Interview with Fred B. Baldwin

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INTERVIEW WITH FRED BALDWIN, SR.
Interview by James Massey, Harford County Library, July 21, 1981
Massey: First of all, you were born right here in Aberdeen?
Baldwin: Might as well say Aberdeen
[interview interrupted]
JM: I want to find out a little bit about who your parents were,
and where did they live, and what did they do?
FB: My father was man. He had stores all over, and that's
where the business went, from here to -- He went and married my mother in New Jersey, and he kept working up to Jersey and New York state and ended up in Buffalo, the main places. He had stores in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse; Erie, Pennsylvania. I don't know just all of them. So my mother moved back here in 1904 or '05, and I was born in 1905- January 7, 1905, just on the edge of Aberdeen, up near Swan Creek.
[interview interrupted]
314: What were their names?
PB: Mary Jane Farley and Joseph Robertson Baldwin.
And he was the son of Timothy Baldwin and Mary Ann
And they were Harford County people, Freddy.
FE: Well, it's all Harford County, the Baidwins.
s They came here in the sixties.
FE: This is where the dividing line, out in front of the house, of where
the Civil War was. On the other side was the North; on this
side, it was the South.
314: Now why was that?
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FB: It divided the county. And then the state or whatever. What
they would do [is], they would desert from the North and join
the South. But then they would desert back to the North. One
story my father told me -- or somebody told me; some of the
B1dwins, anyhow, told me -- was that this little guy --
My father's father was a large man; my father's brother was a
small man. So he was married to a six-foot woman. When the
South came in after him, he got under her hoop skirt. They
never did find him. [all chuckle] And that's what saved him,
the hoop skirt, standing under this big woman's hoop skirt.
They never did find him. My father's father was wounded, and
then he died. He's buried in Abington
JM: Where did you grow up?
FB: Right over there. Just across the road. I grew up there and
went to Aberdeen High School. From Aberdeen High School, I
went to Calvert Hall. Then from Calvert Hall, I went down to
Eastern Maryland for Homerun Baker to play bal 1 • I was there until
Homerun Baker quit, and then they brought this Buck Herzog in
there to manage the ball club. I had beaten his team when I'd
played ball for the Proving Ground when I was with Sargeant
Snyder, for the Second Army Championship, and that old bird kept
a grudge on me the rest of his life. I was there three days
with him and then he fired me because I stole second base. He
didn't even know my batting average or anything else -- and I
never knew my batting avenge -- so here a while back, I got
the batting avenge from a book. I was hitting .294 and fielding
.999, but he let me go. Anyhow, after that -- in 1926 -- I went
with the Orioles, they signed me. I went south with the Orioles
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and slid into second base and tore my leg apart. Never got
me a doctor, so I let that be. They sent me home. Two years
later, they tried to get me to sign up again, and I told them,
"Nothing doing," From then on, I played ball around the
county and around Baltimore city, and different places. I
was in Chattanooga and I was up in Pennsylvania and different
places like that, playing ball. [pauses] So, when I cane
back from Oriole cap, I started working with a plumber and
I turned out to be a master plumber myself. For years, I was
in plumbing and heating and everything. The [First World]
War started and they were getting soldiers in here. I went to
the Proving Ground, and I was in charge down there for seven
and a half years, day and night. Hazel took care of the house
and the family and everything, day and night, because I was there
sometimes twenty hours at a time, sometimes forty hours at a
time. So it just kept going and going like this. Then I was
Superintendent of the town for ten years, until
bought -- [pauses] the property over there.
Swan Meadow.
FB: Swan Meadow. Bought those two hundred and ninety-nine houses,
and I left the town and went to take to charge of all of that.
We have about seven hundred houses and apartments. For the last
twenty years, I haven't been doing anything but just going
around. Then I was Commissioner, you know, a couple times.
I was a Commissioner for the town of Aberdeen three times.
(I'll tell you, She can do this, but I
get something like this, I just hush up.)
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FB: t966, when I was a Commissioner. Yes, that's where it starts. You ran four times for County Commissioner, Fred.
TM: And then you were a County Councilman.
FB: Yes, I was County Councilman a couple of times.
FB: That was in '72, when the Council came in. And I was Chairman of the Board there, for a while. But I'm not used to all this talking like this.
TM: Let's go back. What do you remember, as a child growing up here in Aberdeen? What was it like?
FB: Everything was horses and buggies. Very few cars. We had the first car that Henry Ford made, a six cylinder. My father and Henry Ford were buddies in Buffalo, and Henry Ford wanted my father to go with him. He said, "Henry, I've got five kids. can't take a chance on this." So Henry Ford had a place no larger than this room here, where he first made the first car, in Buffalo, and my father got it. Now, that car is in exhibition in Deerboni [Michigan], sitting right up there: the first six-cylinder Ford that was made. It's sitting there in exhibition someplace; I haven't seen it. In the Ford Museum. Then my brother went out there to work for Henry Ford later on. His
oldest son and Henry Ford's -- one of the Ford sons --
became buddies, and that young fellow, he went to work for Henry Ford for years • For about ten years, he had charge of everything in England for him, and he retired from the Ford Company. A great big salary, retired on it. Two years later, the young guy cane and got him again to go out to Detroit and take charge of some big tank deal they had out there in Detroit.
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We never see him, very seldom see him. So that's where
that young Charles Baldwin is working now. If you're ever
out there in that museum, there's the first Ford. There were
only four cars with tops on them here in those days. A millionaire
had one, and there two more
Well, your father was a millionaire.
FE: Well, I'm talking about now. They use to get racing
one another up and down these old roads, and they caught one of them doing fifty miles an hour, and they thought they were going to crucify him. Fifty miles an hour in that old car. And you remember your father and Teddy Roosevelt.
FE: My father and Teddy Roosevelt were buddies. If the President had let Teddy Roosevelt take an army to France to fight the Germans -- he had a hundred thousand men signed with him -- but the President thought that Teddy Roosevelt would be elected President the next time if he allowed it, so he wouldn't allow it. My brother joined the Marine Corps, and he --
Brother Joe.
FB: Joe; named after my father. They sent him down here to the training camp and they saw he was so good with a rifle, they had him on the first ship going. They went out of New York five times before they finally headed to England, on account of the suhaarines • The Germans had submarines all over the ocean in those days. He went over there and he got one of the highest honors could offer in 1919. He and another sargeant came home
from Tennessee and General reviewed the troops at
Proving Ground. My brother and this other Marine sargeant
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walked down the Platform. He left his escort and went over - and put his arms around hint. Said, "If it wasn't for these kind of men, I wouldn't be here today." The Marines are what saved them. Teddy Roosevelt's son joined the Air Corps, and he was shot down by the Germans.
Kermit.
FB: Yes, Kermit. And the Germans buried him with honors, mind you, after knowing who he was. After shooting him down, they buried him with honors. But I've never heard of this. In 1939, France sent my brother one of the highest honors of the country. In 1939, after twenty years coming home from the War. My brother's dead now. All dead but two sisters.
JN: Did they all grow up right here in Aberdeen?
FE: Yes, they did. -
JMi What was your home life like? Did you have chores and things to do?
FE: I had chores to do. [chuckles] I had chores since I was seven years old. I've been firing fireplaces since I was seven years old, and one of them was over there in the big room. We had a family room that was twenty-six [feet] by thirty [feet]. It had a fireplace in the end of it. It was a game room. It had a regulation pool table. I said right then, "If I ever build a fireplace, I'd sink it in the floor." Because when I was firing a fireplace -- we didn't have a screen or anything in those days -- a spark got on the floor and my backside got it. So that's why I sunk this fireplace. It's fifteen inches from where you step out of that room there to the bottom of that
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fireplace. It will circulate eighty feet away, and one minute in and one minute out to get it lighted. So if you ever build a house, don't build a hearth on it, because you've got that much cold air. There's no cold air there. You can see how I've rigged it up to keep the spRrk and everything. We go to bed at night, and that's a fireplace that won't heat this furniture, won't heat that furniture.
JMi Let's see -- Where did you go to school?
FB: Aberdeen High School.
JMu Didn't you once go to the school that was near the railroad track, too?
FBz That's the one.
No, that wasn't that. Miss Morgan had a school.
FBI Oh, I went to private school. Yes, right by the bottle shop up there. I'd forgotten that. You must have told him that.
JM: Somebody I interviewed told me a little story about you and getting in trouble in school. They used to say that you were ornery. Were you ornery in elementary school?
FB: Well, I wasn't ornery, but the teachers -- When the Baidwins first came here, they blamed the Th1 dwins for everything. My brothers always got the blame, so when I came along, I got the blame. Finally the teacher came up to me one day and. said, "Freddy, I don't think you're doing all, this." And from that time on, I was altogether different to them. But they had blamed all my -brothers before I got there. I had a brother [who was] as ornery as could be in that school, but I just went along until they found out that I wasn't.
s Well, your son, when he came up, they
FB: Yes, same thing.
They've been jealous because your father associated with the people he did and
FB: They didn't want anybody who had any money to tell them
anything. The teachers finally found out it wasn't
Freddy Baldwin doing it all. They wouldn't look around the room. "Freddy Baldwin!" I'd say, "Yes, Ma'am." So one day I said to her, "Now just what were you caning me for?" I didn't even know what she called me for; I'd. say, "Yes, Ma'am." But that was only kid stuff, because all the principals and everybody, we were good friends. Mr. Davis, he was here in
Aberdeen; Willard Davis. His brother was
He had another brother in ; Princeton was
the school. We all got along fine. Then I went to Calvert Hall and got along fine at Calvert Hall,
JMs When did you get interested in playing baseball?
PB: When I was thirteen, I played for this high school team. When I was thirteen, and we had five left-handed bt 11 players on that team. The first hnseman, the catcher, the third. baseman -¬I played second, in those days -- and the pitcher. [chuckles] So we had a good ban team. We didn't have any coaches. It was just the principal. I ended up being the coach. In 1922 or '23, we won the county championship, out where the shopping center is now, where the racetrack used to be in Bellaire. We won the county championship by ten points. Never thought little Aberdeen would win the thing, but we won it.
314: Now in those days, did each community have a baseball team of their own?
Baldwin 9
FB: , Aberdeen, Bellaire --
FE: And Jarrettsvllle. Yes, these schools. Janettsville and Hollins. That was most of them. I think Darlington got in on it one or two times. They were small, but they had a good ic'11
team. That's one thing about : they had all
good ballplayers. They had their own. A lot of these other teams like Rising Sun and Prairieville, they hired the hall-players. They had big leaguers in there pitching.
FB: This is Susquehanna League I'm talking about, now. I played for Bellaire in 1926. I was playing for Bellaire, and that was one of the best ball teams that was around here. Mike Caine was the catcher; Roy Coe was a pitcher and first baseman. The judge's father -- in Bellaire. [pauses] Fkldie he played shortstop for Bellaire. Tom Stearns played the outfield; Paul Stearns played the outfield. I played the
outfield, and I pitched, too. And Father from
Baltimore, he played for Bellaire that year.
He was originally from
YB: Yes. He's still in good shape, and he's seventy-five years old. And a McMahon; there was a McMahon that played. I think McNutt was up there, too; he was a good pitcher. We won the championship, and according to John O'Neill's father .-
I can't find the scorebooks, bit -- he said I hit .556. That's
when the Orioles signed me. It wasn't any-thing for one of these big-league ballplayers to come down here and get five
Baldwin 10
hundred dollars a Saturday to pitch against these teams like
Bellaire. And we'd still beat them. We'd still beat them.
: Then after World War Two, the boys came home.
FB: Well, after I quit the Proving Ground.-- I was down there for
seven and a half years -- I came home and we started a team --
After World War Two,
FB: Yes, "+6. In '46, we started a team. I hadn't played in all
those years, and I just thought, "Well, put the younger guys
in there," and they lost nine ballgaines. The people putting
the money up there said, "You get in there and play ball. You're
not too old to play ball." We went in and won the next fifteen
and we won the pennant.
Those boys changed when you went in there. They were nervous
and
PT: Yes, and they were an young guys. There's one of their pictures
in there on that --
Joe Lee and Oliver Ripley and Bill Whitman and
FE: Billy Ripton and Wally Ripton and Frankie Miller; all that
crowd. We won for two years straight, and then we got second
the next year. It just kind of faded out. I went over to
and run the team for and we won
there for a year or two. Satchel Paige and All the pro colored guys were over there, and I beat them.
That was before '42.
FE: Yes. No, wait a minute.
Sure. That was when you first started out in the thirties. FTh '33 or '34. And I beat them. Three straight ballgaxaes. How much money do you think was bet on those three straight ball-
Baldwin 11
games? Ten thousand dollars. A man told us last year in
Ocean City; he was the man who held all the money. That's the reason they never played any more.
But that was an all-colored team, Satchel Paige and the Baltimore Black Sox.
PB: Yes, that was all pro. Baltimore Black Sox six and Baltimore Black Sox -- two from Homestead Grays and two from in New York, plus Satchel Paige. And this Johnson, that they put in the white Hall of Fame here, a couple of years ago, he played third base for them that day. What made us win was, old Ed Banks -- he'd be about a hundred and five, a hundred and ten now if he was living -- He was at all the bfllga.rnes I ever played in this county, and sometimes I'd take him if he didn't have a ride. He stood back of those colored fellows. -I never warned up on the sideline; I warned up to our own batters. If you wanted to come in and bat, I'd let you come in and bat, and there was no way you could hit. Old Ed Banks stood behind them and he said -- I can't say what he said, because I don't want this on tape. He told them, he saw me kill a man with a ball. So I told Stu Preston, who was going over to play with Aberdeen after this, "Don't reach for the first ball. I'm going to throw it over your head." So I threw the ball in there and it hit the backstop so hard it went forty or fifty feet in the air, and the second baseman caught it thirty or forty feet behind second base on a fly, and they thought he swung at it. They called him a certain name and asked him why he hit at it. He said, "You see that bat? I never moved it. So I ended up striking out seventeen, on one-to-nothing. We played the next
BPI dwin 12
Sunday and we beat them two-to-one. The third Sunday, we beat them three-to-two or something like that. I never knew why they didn't play, but a man -- I met him in Ocean City a couple, three years ago -- he said why they didn't play any more. It was because they'd lost all their money. Satchel Paige went wound to these schools, telling these schools that the only white man who ever beat him in three ballga.mes was Freddy iRa] dwin. I have a boy working for me now who used to go to school when he heard that. He didn't know me then, see. But we used to have a real good ball club.
Now you have to name the man you're talking about.
FB: Hal Copley. He went to Western Maryland, and the story I got
FB: No, he went to Tome, up in --
FB: He went to Tome, and first he was in the Prairieville, and
Mrs. used to pay him five cents a day to come
to school. [chuckles] Then after he got out of Prairieville, he went to Tome, and he was a star at Tome, for football, I think. Western Maryland took him, and that's when DiCarla was there. The story I got was that he married a girl at Western Maryland -- the president's daughter or something -¬and they kicked him out before he got his last degree. Then I tried to get him a job with a fellow I knew in North
He got in the car and was going down there, and he wrecked the car in Churchville, so he never went. Anyhow, one of his buddies from Western Maryland was coaching Rhode Island. No -¬Eastern Boston College. So he asked Copley to come up there and
Baldwin i
go to school to get his other degiee, and help hint on the
side with the football team. As soon as Copley got the
degree, Dick Harlow took him to Harvard with him as a coach.
And Hickman -- you've heard of Hickman -- Hickman and Dick
Harlow were at Harvard. So then, after a certain amount of
years, Dick Harlow quit, and Copley got the job at --
$ Ohio or some place?
FB: He got the job at one of those colleges around Boston there
or something. He wins the division championship. Then he went
to Massachusetts, and he won the division championship there.
Then he went to Brigham Young, and he won a couple division
championships at Brigham Young. But then he went in the service.
I think he was wounded from World War Two. But now he's back
in Rhode Island, and one of the fellows he used to coach has a
job at Rhode Island University and Copley' a there every day
from three o'clock to six in the evening, helping him with
those teams. One of the nicest guys you'd ever see, and
when we had the oldtiners party here -- Harford
Oldtimers -- of course, we were going to honor Copley. I
didn't tell him this, but I got Mrs • Thurland, who's eighty-
three or eighty-four. I told her he was coming down, and for
her to come over. I gave a picnic.
a She
FBi And we didn't want them to meet until we honored him. That
was pretty good. He came in there and he had this thing, so
he got talking to me. I said to Copley, 'Where's your wife?"
He said, "Over there." She was sitting just across the table
from Mrs • Thurland. Of course, she didn't know Mrs • Thurland.
Baldwin 14
And when Copley got finished talking, he came over and sat
down. Now, he's six-foot-two, at least; a powerful big
guy. No fat or anything. And Mrs. Thurland wasn't supposed
to see him until we presented this thing --
And if you ask me,
PB: Well, Copley was sitting down across the table, not saying
nothing until the tears came right down his eyes.
And she jumped up and kissed him.
FBI And she jumped up and kissed him. [chuckles]
Didn't wait.
PB: She didn't wait until he got out there. But you know, at
her age, she danced two dances with him. I'm telling you,
that's some woman, too. Poor old thing, now she got operated
on for her hip or something.
She's a diabetic.
PB' She was great. You want a real man, that Copley. You'll be
around here in February, won't you?
TM: Yes.
FBI How about coming over to one of our parties? I'll give you a
ticket.
JM: I think that'd be interesting.
FBI We've had as high as four hundred and, ten people there.
We could have more, but there's no room.
FR: We don't have any more room in there. We have them from all over.
JM: Now how did that get started?
FBi I started it with two fellows from Rising Sun. That plaque in
there, you read that. That's how it got started.
Baldwin 15
You also formed the Oldtimers Baseball
Association, not just baseball.
RB: Yes, the County Oldtimers Baseball Association.
Th: And what does it try to do?
FE: Just try to have a dinner so everybody will meet at least once a year, and present people with different trophies and things.
the oldtiners that come, and
they're supposed to send
FE: Yes. Some of them are not, but --
That was the formula.
FE: They found out that so many of them are dropping off that
they'd better before their service.
But you had speakers come from different places, different
things. You got different speakers.
FE: Three years ago, we had a couple come in from California, and
one from Seattle, and one from someplace else out on the coast.
From Arizona, five came in last year.
FB: From Arizona, yes, five, last year. And we've had them from
Alabama, Texas. Just to come to that one party.
: Yes, but they were from here.
FE. They were originally from here, yes.
And their husbands played b1l, or they played b1l.
FE: They were all ex-ballplayers.
Yes, but he asked you tether you take the money. It's not a
money-making thing.
PB: Oh, no, no, we're not --
[end of side one, tape one]
Baldwin 16
I said that too. It's not to make money. It's just to get together.
You take that money and divide it between
Harford Community College and the Harford Community College in
Cecile -- well, say it.
FB: Yes. We give each one of them a hundred and ten dollars a year.
Cecile County and Harford County.
College. Community Colleges.
FB: Junior colleges.
JI'!: Why do you think there was so much of an interest in baseball
during the thirties and forties?
FE: Well, you didn't have cars to run around and raise -- just no
television.
And you didn't have the leniency in the family and in the world
that you have today.
FE: It wasn't anything to see five hundred or a thousand people at
these ballgames around here.
I think people took a little pride in their families. They did
care what they were doing.
FE: That's right. They would bet money.
3M: It sounds like it was a real social event to have the whole
community come out and be a part of it.
FE: Oh yes, yes.
It was all these ballplayers wives and own families and people
that associate and kept coming tack.
FE: We won the championship in 147 against Western High, and Dave
and I just said, "Everybody down at the house." I'll bet we
Baldwin 17
had a hundred people around that garage that evening. All of the good ballplayers were from around this section of and Harford County.
Well, they were the leading families of the county.
That's right. But they started playing ball from the time they were little kids on up, and they kept right on going. This Calvin Ripkin who is third base coach for Baltimore, we used to have him when he was ten years old and I was a scout for Brooklyn, in those days. He was my batboy up here when we had a team, and he was giving the signals for me when the people were watching me. He was giving the signals, what I'd told him to give to those players. So he blows how to give signals. The best one of those ballplayers was Oliver. He's up at
Lumberyard. But he went in the War, and he
jumped in Germany and the phosphorous gas got in his ears. Every once in a while, this little pup up in
He was catching one day in Aberdeen and I'm playing center field, and he falls over. I run in there and kneeled down to him and he said, "I didn't tell you, Freddy." And that's what it was. Every so often it struck. But this young Calvin's son, you read about him. Now he's about the size of Oliver, and he's got the spirit of Oliver, so I'm sure he'll make it in the big leagues, because Oliver could, have made it anyplace.
Bill was a good player, too, but he was Mama's --
JMs Did you have any idea you wanted to play for the Orioles? Was
that something you had in mind to do? Did they come up and seek you?
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FB: No, they came for me.
Your father didn't want you to play ball at all.
FB: No, my father didn't want me to play ball. But anyhow, they came to me, and I played on the best teams in Baltimore, on Sundays. See, yan vs ago they didn't have Sundays out here, and then they started Sundays. In '26, I played the
where they used to have the circus cground in Baltimore. Then I went with the Orioles and hurt my leg so I couldn't play for two years. I ended up playing for Bloomingdale on Sundays, in West Baltimore. The players who would play up here at this thing on a Saturday from Philadelphia and different places, I would go to Baltimore with them, back and forth. That was my way of getting back and forth to Baltimore. Three of them from Philadelphia: Quinney, Gorey and
Actually, a Homestead team beat the Orioles. I played with Homestead in '37, but they were beating the Orioles before I played with them. And Charlie Keller was playing with the Homestead when I was playing with them in '37. Then he went with the big league career. Three or four of them --
At the time you took your new recruits and in early or late 'Lo and to Annapolis and beat the plebes.
FBi Oh, yes. We took this Aberdeen team and --
Who had just come back from the Army
VB: And when Max Bishop was coach out there at the Naval Academy. He promised us that if we'd come down there and play, that as soon as the inilgame was over, we could have our dinner. The wives and all the friends we'd take down there. So we beat them
Baldwin 19
eight-to-one, and they asaid, "You won't eat until six o'clock." I told them, "The hell with you,' and we ate at a place along the road, one of these nice places along the road. There must have been thirty of us. But they never asked us back to play no more.
Because they gave you a check for twenty-five dollars that bounced.
FB: Well, yes. They did give us a check for twenty-five dollars, and it bounced. [all chuckle] We never did go back there. Between Hazel and I, we've sent seventeen kids to college through schoThrships and different things and help, we got them in and got them out. We've always helped all the kids, no
matter from Aberdeen, area, wherever a kid needs
help, we'd help them. And when I was commissioner, I got
the lights up at Edgewood High School. They wanted two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and I got them up there for eighty-five thousand. I mean, eighty-five hundred. And they wanted two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Eighty-five hundred. And the bell.
FB: Oh, and the bell on the courthouse. They wanted twenty thousand dollars to take it off the top of the courthouse, and a man that I showed how to play soccer thirty or forty years before, he was a contractor, and he helped me and we took it off for eight hundred and twelve dollars and fifteen cents,
FE: That's right. And where they had the handicapped children in
Belaire at the church, I got that church for -- I think --eighty thousand dollars for the county when they wanted a
Baldwin 20
hundred and fifty thousand for it • Certain guy wanted a hundred and fifty, and I got it for eighty thousand. I also
collected for this fountain for -- that's
in later years. I was up there yesterday, and there's two
men painting in the courthouse, and there's two men out there
scratching around the grounds. I asked them what they were
hunting for. They were hunting for the electric [cable] for
the fountain. So I guess they're going to put the fountain
up there. There's so many things that I've helped out with,
that I just can't recall all of them.
.311: How did you decide to get involved in politics and serving
as a councilman?
FE: People cane to me and asked me. I had no idea of trying to
get into any politics. They came to me and asked me to run.
They still ask him to run.
FE: Yes, that's right. They still ask me. [chuckles]
And what do I tell them?
FE: You'll kill them. [laughs]
No, I don't. What do I tell them, Freddy? The only running
you'll get is from your wife, and you'll run.
FE: Well, that's going to kill them, isn't it? [laughs] It's
terrible.
314: Well, how has Aberdeen changed?
FE: Q-i, my. It's completely turned over.
: You wouldn't know it.
3M: What was it like growing up here?
FE: Well, in the wintertime we used to have sleigh races from the
railroad to the stop light on Route LQ• They
?21 dwin 21
had the fast horses here, too. Dan Patch was raised right out here on that field. They had fast horses. Out at the racetrack one time out there -- a private track, Mr. Baker's. C.W. Baker ovned it. And every afternoon at two o'clock, you'd see five or six or seven fine-looking horses, fast horses up along sleighs. They would stop -- the finish line was a store, Hanway and Gibson's store, right where the stopi gh is now going down the road. That would be the finish line. It would take them from there to the railroad track to get around and stop those horses, they were coming down there so fast. That was an everyday occurrence in the wintertime; snow on the ground all the time, aLL], winter long. My father went up to Aberdeen one Saturday afternoon, walked up. It was snowing. And he never got back until the next day afternoon about five o'clock, there was so much snow coming down. In front of this schoolhouse was a bank and rail fence, and, he was coming down walking the fence to get back over here. [chuckles] 5° it used to really snow here • Half the Proving Ground down here, the only thing opened up down there was where the big tanks could come up and knock the snow down. This was the only road at first, out here. Our brown house which is over there now -¬it's not our now, but -- the government took our big home over here, the commander, and made an office out of it. So my people moved over to this log house which was one of the oldest houses in this town.
Baldwin 22
any soldier walking up and down this road was allowed to come in and get coffee or cake or whatever we had there. So this is funny. My son married a girl from Rochester, and I was up there in Rochester, and I went in the barber shop one day. A fellow said, "I've never seen you in here. Where are you from?" I said, "Aberdeen," "Oh," he said. "My God," he said, "I was in Aberdeen and all the snow in 1917 or '18," he said, "and there used to be a brown house down the road that would give us coffee and cake and different things to eat." He said, "Would you know who they were?" I said, "Yes, I was the kid giving it to you." [chuckles] But he'd remembered it from 1918 to 1952.
To 1950.
FE: But this was the only place that would give them anything to eat, up and down the road.
Your mother was the first USO here.
FE: She made homemade bread and cake and things like that. When the first USO -- After I quit the Proving Ground, we'd have dances up there, and the soldiers were allowed to come in, at the old Aberdeen High School there on Route 40.
FBI That's right. When I was at the Proving Ground for seven and a half years, she took care of everything, and all of the kids from around this section used to be out there. We put a play-room up. We put it downstairs first and then we put a top on it, and it used to be going. They were good kids.
114: Was this a big farming community?
FE: Always was. But all
Baldwin 23
that Proving Ground was farming. When Agnew was in as Vice - President, I had this whole field behind here all signed and ready to go for a veterans' cemetery. When he got out, they just killed it, just like that. You could bury ten thousand people out there, and they don't have anyplace on the Proving Ground to bury anybody. And they just squashed it. That would have been the place to have it. But now what do they do with
it? They're not doing anything with it. was over
there, and you've been over to That play ball
over here on the field.
the girls and boys got out of high school,
you started the softball and basketball for women; sane with
the boys and the men.
FBt Yes, I put the first basketball court in Aberdeen High School
on that road.
Then you had town boys and girls, when they got out of high
school and didn't go on, wanted to play, and you carried them
on. Soccer, baseball, football, basketball.
FB: Yes, we've been going all the time like this. We had a girls'
softball team, had lights set up on the old diamond there by the
old high school on the road.
This was town, then. They were out of school.
PB: It was a town thing. And we had a men's team there. When the
men would play, they might have a hundred and fifty people out
there. When the girls would play, they • d have two hundred, two
hundred and fifty people watching the girls play, and that's
when I was scouting for Brooklyn. Max Terrier, the great bl1player
Baldwin 24
from Brooklyn, he wanted to take Ben Ray's daughter -- that's the chief of police's daughter -- and our daughter to Brooklyn, to go on a professional softball team.
Girls' softball.
FB: And that's one time I would have been killed. [chuckles]
But we used to have crowds out there. Saturdays and Sundays, when we finally started playing Sunday ball. And holidays. That place would be crowded. From all over, Edgewood and Bel¬laire and every-place else, to the h 1 lgame -- plus Aberdeen.
putting the first basketball in
that auditorium. Aberdeen High School never had it.
PB: Reverend was coach for the girls.
Presbyterian minister.
PT: I put the board up there. It was in the school, and I asked
Mr. Wright, Mr. Willis. He said, "If you can do it, do it." So I crawled in the top of that ceiling -- I'd never been in there before -- and saw a beam up there. The beam just happened to be right in the center of the room. I got clamps made to clamp the steel pipe in the basketball thing up there. Then they set up on the stage, the spectators sat on the stages, the way they used to do. They had bleachers up there. That was a hot going every-thing too. We've had a time with these children. Those kids just loved us and we loved them.
I Well, there was only two cars when they were in high school to transport that took them to the games. There were no buses. You and I drove and took them.
PT: Hazel would drive the car and I'd drive my panel truck. See, I
Baldwin 25
was a registered plumber. I had seats -- I had where I put my tools down and I'd take them out and they'd put all their stuff in there. We'd take them all over the state. We never regretted it, all those children.
Well, the parents just didn't bother. There was no other way.
PT: In '52, we knew all the players that played the Yankees in the World Series with Brooklyn. We'd see them down at Cambridge, where they had a club. I'd quit work wound three o'clock and get my van, truck, and get these guys who wanted to try out like the Ripkins and Deke Hall. You know Deke Hall. And all those fellows, and we'd take them down there for tryouts, and that's how they got started.
That's where the with the Dodgers.
FE: That was the Dodgers' farm team. And all those fellows who
played in the '52 World Series, we knew every one of them. We hear some of them asking about us.
And Deke Hall, I found out where he's, what he's doing. He's working for the city of Baltimore now, in some athletic thing.
We stayed at a hotel down there. In Cambridge. And the boys,
you know, they'd want to keep carrying on and everything. They told us, they said, "We're not going to let them in here if you don't really make them behave." So one of the last times we were down there, Hazel and I were in one room on one side of the hall, and there was thirteen of them in the other room. It was a great big room.
On cots,
FE: And I heard a noise over there about twelve-thirty, one o'clock and I got up and went over in that room, and that big Deke Hall,
Baldwin 26
he was that much too long for the single bed he was in. He had the pillow over his head and the blanket up there, and I said, "Boy, what are you up to?" They had poured liniment down his back -- this Buddy Buingaurd, the plumber -- they had poured liniment down his back. [laughs] They said, "He's out doing the beach." I went out there and it was moonlight, and you could see mosquitoes as big as my little finger on him. Instead of getting in the water and sitting down in the water, he was taking the water and splashing it on him. It wasn't doing any good. That was one of the last years, I guess, we were down there. Cambridge. They gave up on Cambridge. We didn't have no more to go down. But we've always helped every¬body.
Then you went to scout for Rex Cohen.
FB: Then I went scouting for Cincinnati. Rex Cohen and two fellows used to do the booking for Cincinnati. Joe -- Rex's brother --was his second-in-command. Now, Joe's the head man in command at Cincinnati, and one of them is with Pittsburgh. I think it's Rex with Pittsburgh. I heard that a couple of weeks or so ago.
Both of them were schoolteachers.
FB: Yes, they were both schoolteachers. They left schoolteaching to be scouts. As I say, the best thing is when I married Hazel, we did buddy-buddy together, help out kids everyplace we could. Help out anybody everyplace we could. I've gotten so many people jobs that I don't even know where I've gotten them. People come in here, "You helped my grandfather get a job,
Baldwin 2?
Mr. Baldwin. Can't you help me?" Those kind of things. You know, that makes you feel good.
JM: Do you remember when they built Route LO through Aberdeen?
FE: Oh, yes. It used to just be one single road down through there. RB: It was the old post-road.
PB: It was so narrow. Where the Grove Church is up there, that
road going down here used to be the main one from
Down where Clark Connolly and Joe Lee had the beer place,
down on the corner, that's where it came out. Right there
at that corner. There's been a lot going on since I was
first here.
HB: Freddy, they built down there. It was called Philadelphia
Road to start with, before Route 40.
FE: That's right. Right here at the crossroads up here, at this
light. You see that sign up there: 1616, or something. That's
when it was started. And this log house over here, that we own,
was right where that Presbyterian Church is now. Part of
that house is log.
RB: It was your Uncle Jared's home, your father's home. Then
the church bought the land and he moved the house onto his
land over here and built the church on the land he sold to the
church.
FE: Right on the corner there, where there's a three-apartment
house, that was a store. We had a grocery store. Sell
clothes and groceries and different things. You know how an
old-time store used to be: it would sell anything.
HBz Country store. Then in 1917 they built the house and
FE: That's right.
B 1 dwin 28
RB: Well, you say it. I'm not You say
it.
FE: They're the best-built houses in Aberdeen, this housing corporation.
Because they're built out of five-by-fours, not an inch-and-a-
hnlf-by-two. Everything in those walls are five-by-fours.
The government built all of this, for the people working on
the Proving Ground. 1917's when it was built.
JM: Did things change quite a lot in Aberdeen once the Proving
Ground opened?
FE: It was bou to; it was bound to. Most of these people came
here from New Jersey. They transferred them down from New
Jersey.
RE: New Jersey -- Morristown.
FB Morristown, yes • The old-timers were all down here. The
and the Bergers and all those people, they all came with a group from up in New Jersey. They had enough to fill all those houses, and this housing corporation
RE: And World War Two, they came and took everything. And
when got started in
World War Two. They wanted to take five acres of land up there to make single people's rooms, see. There wasn't nothing to do but let them have it. And later on, they came and took the rest of it, next year, and built all those other places. You don't remember that. They're all two-story apartments. Then here, a couple of years ago, they were deteriorating so bad the town was saying they'd have to tear them down or some¬thing, so the government cane in and built those new ones in B1dwin Manor. Called H.U.D. [Housing and Urban Development]
Baldwin 29
But it's our property that they're on.
314: Now, did you say that you rent houses? Is that it, that you have houses that you rent to people around Aberdeen?
FB: Oh, yes. I have three partners in that. We incorporated. We
have seven hundred and fifty or sixty apartments and houses. Swan Meadows, mit dwin Manor, North Dean. Apartment
HB: Winston.
FB: Winston Hall. Hillside in Aberdeen. HB: And Deli Grove.
FB: And Dell Grove, right across from We own all
of those; the corporation owns them.
311: Were a lot of them built to accomodate the people that were
coming in? -
HB: Not all. It was the built Winston Hall
FB: That was in and then they couldn't
hold onto it and they wanted to sell it.
HB- And built up there and
the built Hillside and sold them to us
FB- The government built all these houses over here. There's two
hundred and ninety-nine houses over there, Swan Meadow. The government built all of those.
HB: We owned the property near Baldwin Manor, and that's why it's called Baldwin Manor. We incorporated later, against my wishes but we did. I like to say that.
FB, was built by the government, too, and then we
bought those houses.
B8 1 dwin 30
JM: How did the people of Aberdeen receive all these new people coming in? Were they receptive, or was a little --
PB: Yes and no. If it hadn't been for these people, I don't know what they would have done. They had three grocery stores. HB: And churches of all denominations.
FIB: They had three grocery stores and a butcher shop; a couple of them. In those days -- Maybe I'd better I'd better not say what I was going to say. (Turn that thing off there.) [interview interrupted]
Forty years ago, there couldn't have been over a thousand people in the town, forty years ago • We've been married fifty-three years • I'm going on seventy-seven years old. I do all the log-splitting and cutting for that fireplace. That's a
thing, you Imow • You can go to bed with a roaring fire in that room and never touch nothing. Our furnace never comes on all night long. You don't want to hear about that, but I have twelve or thirteen cord of wood every winter out
here, but my cut it up there
I don't know what else I could tell you. I've got all kinds of
basebl1 clippings. See, I just came up as a kid.. I was
borrowed from boxing in 1935. I
was a professional -- look at this one there. I was never in the ring in my life. I had a filling station down here, from about '31 to '35, '36. Boys used to come up there, and I'd train them how to box. I never boxed. So one night over there
a man took me out of the audience about and
all this stuff. I said, could whip you right there." So
Baldwin 31
instead of the guy that said it, they got a professional to come over. There happened to be a soldier down here that was a sparring partner for Jack Dempsey when he was fighting [Gene Tunney. He was over there, and he said, "Baldwin, what are you going to do?" I said, "I'm going to fight some way or other." He said, "That guy's a professional. Don't you hit at him first." So I go out there to shake hands, you know, to be introduced, and he split my nose. He split my nose open like that. So, Spike Webb, who was a coach for the Naval Academy, he was the referee that night. I went after that joker so fast that he jumped out of the ring, out through the ropes. This fellow sitting there said, "You must have hit him fifty times." So Spike Webb said, "You're barred." I had blood still coming out of my nose, and I said to Spike, "Are you talking to me?" "Yes," I said, "Well, I'm damned glad you barred me, because my wife didn't want me over here in the
first place." But I'd whipped him. That's the first time
and last time I was ever in the ring. But that's the
way things go. We used to have an kinds of athletes in our town, everybody playing something. In 1927, they had
Dick that great pitcher for St. Louis. He was
pitching for He had won one World Series game
against the Yankees on a Thursday, but he wouldn't pitch on a Sunday, so he wasn't going to pitch on a weekend. So Mr. who owned the Mills up there, hired him to come over there to play against Bel Air. That was in '26, I think it was. Yes, it was '26. And we beat them. And he got a thousand dollars to pitch this one ballgame, and he brought the catcher along
Ba 1 dwin 32
with him. That's how they used to -- They bet all kinds of money, you know. It wasn't nothing for a man to bet a car. I've seen Pete Rose, a man bet him a car there one day. Said, "I'll bet you." In Aberdeen. Bet him a car that we'd beat him. You know, that's going a long ways.
HB: Tell about the one, had a filling station and came
to Bel Air and
[end of side two, tape one]
and Genera]. Earl or
Early and the fell off or fell off, and
how
they had a dedication of the Woods Building at
and they were all invited and a relative was
there.
FB: She means from playing ball.
HB. You know who they are; that's very interesting.
F But -- What went on first, do you know?
HB: The fellow that -- you know who he was --
FB: Oh. From Rising Sun. We were going to play Rising Sun, and
we beat them. That was about '48, and he was a ringer, sure. '48, '49, something like that. I hadn't seen this guy, only this one time at the ballgane, and we beat him. I bunted the ball and Staples scored from third base and we beat him. So here I see him in Bel Air when I was Commissioner, '66 or 167. After the meeting I said to him, "Shouldn't I know you? I believe I know you." "tanned right," he said. "I owe you a punch in the mouth." I said, "You were the pitcher for Rising
Tin 1dwTh 33
Sun." He said, "Yes, I was supposed to get three hundred and fifty dollars and only got a hundred." (i think it was only a hundred.) So he was going to get three hundred and fifty. Come to find out, he was from Philadelphia and he was arguing over at a filling station in Edgewood then, but of course that was years later. But all those kind of guys.
HB: When you played for the Proving Ground.
FB: I played for the Proving Ground in 1922 under the name of Sargeant Schneider, and we won the Second Amy championship, with me pitching for the Proving Ground. So we were down to the Edgewood Arsenal, about '68 I guess it was, they were dedicating the Woods Building down there. Before we had dinner, they were moseying around the officers' club, just standing around talking. I heard a voice over my shoulder, and J turned around -- and I'd told John O'Neill and Howard Coburn about playing toll at the Proving Ground -- I heard a voice over my shoulder and I turned around and looked at that man, and I said, "Didn't you play ball for the Proving Ground in 1922?" He said, "Yes, but who the hell are you?" I said, "I pitched for you.,, He said, "The Kid?" (i think I was seventeen.) I said, "Yes, the Kid. You played third base or second bnse." He said, "Yes." And I don't remember names very often, but I knew his name after he told me who he was. He was two-star General
He's retired and he lives at Fort Virginia.
And I took him right over to John O'Neill and I told John and Howard Coburn, "You don't believe me when I tell you this. I played ball for the Proving Ground." I said, "Ask the general." He said, "Yes, I was only a lieutenant, but he pitched
Pal thtin 34
for us." And he invited Hazel and I down to spend a week
with him, talk about old times.
HB: Yes, but ten about what happened. Didn't he play ball, go
to Washington, somebody hurt his ear? Was he the one?
YB: No, no. He wasn't the one with the ear. I know what you're
talking about, but I can't recall that. But anyhow, his sister
was General Woods' widow, and they were dedicating that building
to General Woods down there. After all those years, from '22
to '68.
HE: And he wanted us to go to the head table and eat with them.
FB: Oh boy, yes. He said, "Don't eat with them; come on and eat
with us." So I ate with the family. I ate with him. There
were funny things like this.
HE: a man, a soldier that stepped on his ear?
Was that Early? tore his ear off?
FE: That was old Uncle that bit the ear.
HB: You played at the Proving Ground, and a soldier didn't like an
officer and these three spiked and tore the man's
ear off.
FE: Oh, yes. That. I don't know that. I don't remember that
fellow. He went into the base and deliberately kicked him, knocked his ear. Yes, I remember.
HB: Don't tell it if you can't tell it right.
FE: Well, I know about the ear, but I don't remember the name. It was so long ago.
HB; It was Early. Not Uncle Earl; Early. Fellow named Sargeant or Lieutenant Early.
Pa ldwin 3.5
FB: Oh, that was playing soccer. He was playing goal. Lieutenant Early was playing soccer when we won the championship in Baltimore, and they kicked him in the ear. That was Lieutenant Early; he turned out to be a general or something too.
HB: He's still alive.
PB: Yes. Never hear of him. Let me get you a picture of that soccer team. I'll show it to you.
HB: But you did. You went to see Wrly in Baltimore, General
Early. They were called the See Frciddy, he
didn't rehearse this, and what you're asking, it's not all coming to mind right away. I'm on the sideline, and I can remember better than him because I'm just a listener, and it comes to me quicker than it does to him.
W: I guess you really surprised them all, how well you could play. F?: Oh, my. We played the Wingfoots. The Wingfoots were professional.
Germans. And we played the Wingfoots, and they beat us, I think, five-to-two or five-to-three, but they had two referees: their cousins. We played Patterson Park before fifteen thousand
people.
RB: Everybody doesn't know where Patterson Park is • You have to
tell them.
F?: And when Rosenbloom started this club in Baltimore about five
or six or seven years ago, I took him down this picture -- one picture like that -- and I showed him, I said, "If you don't have hometown people, you're not going to have anybody." So what's he do? He goes down in Jamaica and hired all those Jamaicans. They played five games in Pal timore, and he didn't have five thousand people to all five gaines, and he folded up.
Baldwin 36
He'd bought uniforms and everything. We had fifteen thousand
people watching us that day we played for the championship.
HE: Yes, and you were chosen to go play with them. Follow it up. You were supposed to go on to South America.
FE: Oh, yes, yes.
HE: Well, say it. They don't know that's being said.
FE: Yes, I was supposed to go with them. There was an all-Maryland prep football team when I went to Calvert Hall. That's me on this end, and that's Dick. That's Jim Home and all and all those big-time guys from
3M: Now, did you stay down at Calvert Hall?
FB: No. They didn't have a place to go there then. Let's see: I want to get my glasses to see it. See if this one man's on there. I went down to the seven o'clock train in Aberdeen every morning and I walked through the station. See that the
down there, walking. We didn't have anything. You walked all the time.
HE: All right. There's your footbR 11 from your All-Maryland Prep.
Tell how you were chosen All-Maryland Prep.
FE: Well, I showed him this picture.
HE: That's showing it, but that's not telling it. You showed it,
but how were you chosen AU-Maryland Prep to get this football
for being All-Maryland Prep player?
HE: That's right.
HE: Weren't you chosen between you and Jack Woburn?
FE: Yes.
HE; Well, tell it!
Pal dwin 37
FB: I'm looking for this to see if this is Jack Woburn here. don't want to say something that's not right. Yes, that's right. There's Jack Woburn, right there. He went to City College, and we're still friends. We go to Boston to see him and he comes in
HE; And you were going to Maryland Prep that year.
FE: I was the top one; they picked me as the top one.
HE: The Sun did.
FB: The Sun paper did,
HE: And that's the gold ball they gave you. 1924. And I wear it of
my lapel.
JM: And The Sun picked you as the outstanding player that year. HE: It was between he or Jack Woburn. And Jack Woburn was Dr.
Woburn's brother from and he's up in Boston now,
and we're still friends. We've
[chuckles] Now Freddy, show in that book, you have to tell what you're showing. Because he sees it, but the tape has to know what you're showing.
FE: [pauses] Oh, here's another one about the Aberdeen High School. I was the one that got the lights put in at Aberdeen High School, and here's a letter that the principal wrote to me. "We appreciate your help in the completion of our foottel 1 light project. You and your crew rendered a service that we could never have afforded otherwise. I know that with your interest in athletics and devotion to the community of Aberdeen, you must share our pride in fulfillment of this project. Friday night at 7:45 p.m. we're going to dedicate our football lights. I would like very much for you to be there. We want the
Baldwin 38
opportunity to recognize those of you who helped so much," HB: What year was that? Look at the top of the letter. What year was that?
FE: Oh, 161. We went over to Bainbridge and got the poles and things from where Bainbridge had it, with the footb1 1, And most of the electric lines and everything, the lights, and that's how we got them over here, and we put them up.
HE: They gave you the bleachers, also.
FBI Yes, we got the bleachers, too. That was from the high school, the first of it. Here's one from Tony Brackett. He's an attorney in Baltimore. He works for the union, but the government hired him to go all over the country for them.
HE: Yes, but you befriended Tommy before --
FE: And I played ball for Homestead in the thirties, I guess it was. Anyhow, this fellow played W1 He was catching for Homestead in -- I think it was '37. That's when it was, '37. In about '42, I was down at my nephew's party in Baltimore, and an arm came around my shoulders and he said, "Freddy, get me a job." I said, "Do you want to go on a bulldozer?" "I don't care," he said, "I want to get married." There was a man on the Proving Ground -- like I said, I had charge down there for seven and a half years -- and when this man from Chicago first came down there --
HE: You were in charge of what for seven and a hF.lf years?
YB: Practically everything: all the plumbing, heating, sewer, water, everything like that. The only thing I didn't have was the carpenter's shop, electric shop, refrigeration shop and the paint shop. The rest was all under me. Anyhow, I said, "Go
I
Baldwin 39
to this fellow in Chicago" -- and I have to get him to tell
me this Juan's name, because I've forgotten it --
HE: Mathers,
FE: Whatever it was. "And tell him that I sent you, and he'll give
you a job, I'm sure." When I first knew this man, he and I didn't get along because he wasn't doing the work right, and I would just break the pipes out of the ditch and make him put them in. But the last two years, I said, "I don't want any money out of you or anything else. Just do the work right. So I hadn't heard from Tommy in a couple of years. I was down at my nephew's house in Baltimore a couple of years later, and an arm came around my neck. He said, "I can run a bulldozer." This guy gave him the job. So he came back here, and he was a 1-in11player, so the head of this union down there was a tllplayer too, so they hired him as their lawyer. But then the government hired him, to start him off with fifty thousand a year. Now they tell me he's making about two hundred thousand a year, going all over the world for them. Just read that. [pauses]
HE: You have many, many friends, Freddy.
PT: Isn't that something? Here's our first party, of the Oldtiiners baseb11.
HE: Of Harford- County, or what?
YB: Yes, it was held in Harford- County, and it was held in
Rising Sun. This old boy was with the Orioles in 1914, a
catcher. Potts, and you couldn't have gotten a
better catcher in your life. He had a brother, but he was no Ml 1 player. And he just quit the Orioles and came home and went to work. But we had that fire hall, and here's Claude Brown
Baldwin 40
and here's Laura, here, Hazel. I didn't know I had this picture.
HB: Well, I'm going to make you a scrapbook, but I haven't
gotten to it yet. You have many things I have all collected, but I don't have put in.
FB: We had two hundred and fifty people, and Pottsy made two hundred and fifty-one, because they were only supposed to feed two hundred and fifty people.
HB: He had many more clippings. Then a colored woman working for
us, I sent her to the attic one day to clean the attic, and
it was in a and she brought it down and threw them
away. That's all we have left of that, of that paper.
FB: Here's one. You want me to talk that one to you?
JM: Yes. What's this about? -
FB: [pauses]
HB: I didn't know you had those in there.
FB: I didn't know it either, for a while, but I found then. Here's
a little -- this is the same thing, I think -- or is it?
3)1: That's a little bit different.
HB: You just stay downstairs, Freddy, and I'll put your other book in first, in the new book. [pauses]
3)1: It says that you helped make a city dump. Is that here in Aberdeen?
FB: It was here in Aberdeen, and it was sent all over the world as the best dump in the world. I think I had a clipping of that in there; let's see if I can find it. I'll show you the real --[pauses]
3M: It says that Aberdeen had more playgrounds than any -- than
Baldwin 41
South Baltimore.
HE: Well, freddy made them. Different parts of the town, there was land, and he cleared them off and fixed them up and had little children out there, and they were playing. That was before your Parks and Rec
And the kids all were
And there was real competition then. You had to be better; it was a little frightening. Children were children, and they took care of themselves, and they ran
Mothers didn't get into it, and no one else
It makes children; they can think for themselves, and
they weren't thinking like a lot of people today, out to hit you in the head with a b.11 or something like that. That was
FE: That's Nellie. We played an Oldtisners up in Bel Air one day, HB: It was a couple of years ago up in Eel Air, He was the
JN: Yes, he had the orchard, didn't he?
HE: There are McNutts, but he didn't have the orchard. His wife
was a schoolteacher in She's still alive.
Nice family, What are you laying down? What are they?
FE: That's some more pictures of the bailgame in Eel Air. The
time we played up there in Eel Air, that Saturday afternoon
or Sunday afternoon.
HB: But when was this Saturday afternoon?
FB: Yeats ago,
HE: Back in '28?
FE: No, no, this was when Nellie and all of them got together.
Baldwin 42
HE: Well, I've never seen those. You've kept those to yourself.
FB: Well, I thought you had.
HB: No, not to my knowledge.
FE:
J1: Now is this the Oldtimers baseball?
FE: Yes, this is old Cleaver Potts, the one we honored:
that's Cleaver Potts.
HE: About what year? You don't have it marked on. I'll put them
all on if you'll tell me.
J}I: It looks like '73. There's a sash that says 1973.
FE: That's about right.
HE: '73? And it's you?
FB: Yes, this was the Oldtimers, up there in Bel Air one Sunday.
HE: Oh, the group got together and played ball. That was Miss
Baltimore, who's here now, I think, standing there. Yes, this was when the older group got -- You played on the senior high school playground a couple of times, the Oldtimers from the Athletic Association of Baltimore, the Oldtimers. See, Baltimore has these; he's a member there, too.
FE: And we whipped them. They never came back. [chuckles] They didn't like us.
HE: And he was put in the Hall of Fame. Am I correct
on that?
FB: I pitched two, three innings of that game.
RB: You went in with Herb Armstrong, who was the superintendent of schools, public schools, in ltimore.
FB: Had the Oriole uniform on. I went in there to get to the that morning.
Baldwin 43
HE: You don't have the 7
FE: Yes, I've got it.
HB: Well, see now, you've been in all these things and what with
all the others I have for you, I don't have then to put together
when I do it. You haven't shared these,
FB: I've shared
HB: Can't you trust me? Call laugh] Well, you said you shared it
with no one.
FE: I bet you've never seen a dump as clean as that.
JN: I sure haven't. Now where is this?
FE: It's not here anymore. It was right across here where they're
making that new sewer plant, back of Hamilton Court.
HE: At the project. You turn right and it's in there,
to the right.
FE: There's how it was when I first got it. That's when I first
went to town, to seek town.
HE: '52.
FE: That's all the smoke you'd ever see out of that place.
HE: They used to come up and fish, down back in that stream.
FE: Old people would come up on Sundays, down behind this woods. Down behind that woods is a stream. You can see the bank of the other side of the stream now. There'd be anywhere from fifteen to thirty people there, fishing every Sunday; bring their children out there. They had their tables and their chairs, and sit out along here below this place. They just had a ball. The Caterpillar come, he took a picture of it and sent it all over the world: the cleanest dump in the world.
HE: Who was the Caterpillar man? Was that their name? Was it
Baldwin 'A
FB: See, we bought the tractors from him.
3M: Well, you really have a reputation from these articles. As
I can remember, didn't they title you "Freddy the "
FE: That's right. There's Freddy on a bulldozer one day. See, I'd go around there and play around with that bulldozer, cleaning it up so we could get the road down around the creek. I had a man that worked it, and he was just as anxious to have a nice place as I was. It was lucky to have something like that. But Jack Woburn, the one on this picture of the All-State, we're still friends. We go to Boston to see him, and he comes
Did you read this one? I don't know; this is the same thing,
I guess. Was this telling about my boss? -
3M: Yes, right.
HE: And here's the best
JM: Yes, this is the same as the other one.
FE: I guess you read that.
3M: No. [pauses] "Outstanding all-around athlete in the history
of Harford County."
FE: A mighty nice one.
3M: Baseball, track, soccer, boxing, tennis, golf, football.
FE: You know who I used to play against in tennis? I never thought
I could play tennis, but I must have been pretty good. I played
against Herbert Arthur and Risley Baker, the one who just died
here last year? The Oldtirners star and the winner. There's
Baldwin 45
bell atop the county courthouse, or helping a high school football team get lights for their field." I laugh where it says, "Now the voters have recommended retirement. Perhaps it's just as well. Freddy has always been the kind of person you like to have in government, but somehow a bit more of a human being than you come to expect in the political world." [chuckles] I think that's a real compliment.
FB: That's right. Do you want to read, this, or want me to read it to you?
HB: Maybe he can handle it.
3M: Oh. Now this is by Park Chatfield about Sport Chattering.
Isn't that something. Let's see: this was in '63. This is the
Th: No, that's Aberdeen's paper.
Th: [pauses] Let's see. Now, the poem that you have, "Ode to the Canners." "The following is a reprint from the Democrat sport page of Septembr 21, 1955." Do you remember that poem that they wrote in here? "Ode to the Canners?" "Whatever became of their friends and their pals/ of short years ago those fine fellows and gals?/ Those fans that rooted and hollered for every great play/ Those bleachers that were crowded, happy and gay?/ Oh, where are they now, those fans that once cared?/ For the Aberdeen bleachers lay deserted and bare./ Then the season was over, the cup race it was run/
When the League pennant conceded and won./ when
unloved and unwanted ere gallants went down,/ In the post-season playoffs at Old Chesapeake Down./ Now is there an Aberdeen fan whose heart it can soar,/ o'er the flight of the Canners, who
Baldwin 46
were game to the core?/ Or are so calloused that our voices are still,/ Caring not for the Canners nor the traditions we kill?/ For there were Jacobs and Baldwin and three Ripkins,
too;/ and Walker, all in there
fighting for you./ While Grafton and were the
stout-armed pair/ who curled out their arms, but you didn't care./ So what ever became of their friends and their pals/ Of short years ago, these fine fellows and gals?" Do you remember that?
FB: No, I don't just remember, but I just happened to pick this up. I didn't know I had that, even.
HB: There's a lot here, Freddy, that you didn't know. I'm gathering it up, but I can't find it if he -- [chuckles] ill: Isn't that something. That's really nice.
HB: See that cabinet over there? That was in my attic and J brought it down especially to sort: his pile, my pile.
FB: Here's a medal from Georgetown University: third place in broad jump.
HB: That was yours.
FB: Hollard High School never knew it, but the fellows from Hollard. High School would come down and pick me up and take me to these track meets under the name of Charlie Archer. I was in the broad jumping pit at Georgetown. I jumped twenty-one feet, nine and a half inches or something on the first jump. They come and say, "You got get into the hundred-yard dash." I said, "This is a hell of a thing, to put me in a hundred-yard dash out of a broad jumping pit." So I go and get in the hundred-yard dash, and the guy beat me by a foot and a half in the hundred-yard dash. Where do you think he went? He went to the Olympics.
Baldwin 47
In 1924. And the people in Harland never knew it, and the
women up in Harland used, to kid me and carry on about
bailgames and Harland High School. I said, "I'm a Harland
High School alumni."
[end of side one, tape two]
Anyhow, they had us up when I was a Commissioner. This was in
'66, wasn't it, Hazel?
RB: They had an alumni supper.
FB: Anyhow, I went up there and they introduced me as a county
commissioner. And I had this in my pocket. I said, "I don't
want to be introduced as a county commissioner. I want to be
an alumni of Harland High School, and here's the medal to prove
it." And these women were -- But Fred Linkus, that great
football player from Maryland -- he was from Maryland,-he was
one of the boys with us. They'd pick me up and we'd go out
to these different track meets. But that's where it came from.
I held the broad jumping [record] for Harford County until
1958, I guess, from 1923 or '24. In those days, we were out
there at that racetrack, as I said, and they had a great big
piece of wood, a two-by-four, where you had to jump from. Well,
I wasn't going to touch that thing to jump from. I used to
jump from that far in back of it, and I still had the record
for all these years, until some guy here about six years ago
or ten years ago beat me • And here's another thing.
J1' "Presented to Fred Baldwin, 1947. Highest batting average, .439,
Susquehanna League." Isn't that something.
FBi So they wanted to give me a medal to put on my arm or something.
Baldwin 48
I said, "I don't want any medals. I fool with these kids; give me a stopwatch." So I got the stopwatch here. Now this was in 1947. I was forty-two years old. And the one that I was with Eel Air, in 1926, was -- What's that? Oh, yes. That's Aberdeen. I forgot about that.
HB: You're showing but you're not talking. That is a wristwatch
given to you by Say it.
IN: "Baseball championship, 1946.'
FE: This is a watch that the town of Aberdeen gave me for running the ba].lclub in 1946. We won the pennant.
HE: That was presented to you by the team.
FE: We had a big banquet and everything. I didn't know I was going to get it, but they presented it to me. This was in -- I was forty-two years old when I got this. But when I was in, Eel Air in '26, when the Orioles signed me, John O'Neill's father was a schoolteacher. He told me I was hitting .556. That's when the Orioles signed me. .556. You very seldom get up to that kind of -- I didn't know it, but John O'Neill's father kept score. And I can't find the book. I'm looking for any old.timers' scorebooks I can find so we can have them someday to put them on display in the Oldtimers' Association. I never knew it was in the paper, but one day somebody said, "You get Chatfield's paper." And that shows what we've done. It's not only me in the paper. But Chatfield, when he first came up to me, he didn't even want to talk to me. [laughs] He was kind of scared of me. He was the new man around town, and they told him, "You'd better watch him," they said. [laughs] Our life
Baldwin 49
has been with the kids around here. I'm on my knees every night to thank the Lord for what I have. But I always ask Him to help everybody; I just don't thank Him for my own. I ask Him to help everybody, because everybody needs help. A man came up to me, he was down at the Proving Ground to the
Were you down there the day on the veterans?
RB: The Vietnam veterans.
FB: The Vietnam veterans, and somebody else. I had a man come up
to me and introduce me to his son. He said, "Freddy, will you
get him a job?" I said, "Where's he living?" He says, "He
just came up from someplace, he's living with me. He's got
three children, four children." He said, "You gave me a job
thirty years ago." Which I did, on the town. I talked to a
fellow, and I believe the fellow was calling him already.
HB: Well, when you came home, the fellow was here, the boy.
FB: Yes, the man working for us -- I thought he needed a man, so
I told him to get in touch with hint, and I know this guy will
do him a good job. The man said, "He can run a bulldozer, he
can carpenter, he can paint, he can do anything." So I don't
know what happened to him, wherever he's living. He's up here
in Aberdeen now, with his father. But people come in here and
ask me to get them jobs, and I try to get them jobs. I have
a lot in the county that used to work for me in Aberdeen, a
lot of the workers on the ronris. They worked for me in Aberdeen,
and they're still working for the county. Some of them retired,
I guess, now. I know this colored boy. But it never does no
harm to help people. I never hold a grudge on nobody, no
matter how bad they treat me. I hold no grudge. I had a guy
Baldwin 50
that held a grudge on me for thirty-three years from striking him out in a baflgarne. What do you think of that? [chuckles] Thirty-three years. And after thirty-three years, he came to me in a diner one day and apologized for it. Well, I don't know tat else I could tell you. I know there's a lot of things, but I think I've taken up enough of your time.
314: Well, all in all, you've seen quite a lot of changes that have come in to the town.
FB: Certainly.
314: Is there anything that you wish, maybe, that's sort of fogotten now, that you wish that Aberdeen hadn't lost, or Harford County? Of anything?
HB: There's one thing: the charter.
FB: Oh. That's Harford County, the charter. That was the wrong thing to do, put a charter in this town. Yes, sir. I was against it. That charter. That wrecked the whole works, and ain't nothing doing on it now. They won't give up on it.
HB: All those that were back of it, thought it was the best thing. They've found out now.
FE: The very ones that came to me and wanted me to go with them on it, said, "You were right, you were right."
HE: Well, Billy James and all the group said they were wrong.
John Clarke and all of them. All of them
said it was wrong.
FE: Yes, it's too bad. But when just three of us was up there with that charter, we could sit down and work things out. That handicapped school there in Eel Air, in the old Methodist Church. One guy wanted to sell it for a hundred and fifty
Baldwin 51
thousand, but we didn't give him no hundred and fifty
thousand. All those kind of things.
JM: What was it like being a county commissioner? Was it a very demanding kind of thing? Did people --
FE: No. I got along fine that way. These people would call me up, and I'd go out and talk to them. If they were wrong, they were wrong. If I was wrong, I was wrong.
HE: But it's far different from county councilman. Like day and night. There's so many holes in County Council
FE: That's right. We're now called for all of this. I'm sure
what's going to happen is, going to try to
run the county. They're talking about getting the County
Council moved, aren't they, to ? Where are
they from? They're all out of Baltimore. They're not worrying over this county. It's too bad.
JiB:
Now there's so much formality, you can't do anything.
FB: [chuckles] And they've got so many in the audience now, carrying on and, getting up and talking. They don't know what they're talking about, half of them don't.
HE: Didn't you use to do that, after the meeting was over? You had an open forum.
FE: You went through with what you had, to do, with the county commissioners. Now, it's all scattered helter-skelter and everything else.
Baldwin 52
.1)1: Was the government, too, a lot more simplified, as the commissioner system? It wasn't as many --
FB: Sure. You didn't have so many running around and hollering
about this, hollering about that, wanting their part done and letting the other ones go. I got the second story put on the
nursing home in and I got the third story,
I think, in the hospital. I was in there then. With Hal
Colt and John O'Neill. You go into Hospital,
they've got a gold plaque up on the wall. I'm sure my name is right on it. Now, they've gone to millions of dollars, building on the same land, but they're putting it higher. And the beds will be filled, too. They'll be all filled.
HB: You're still on the nursing board.
FB: Yes, I'm on the nursing board.. I was the one who got that place
back of the nursing home for the helicopter. That's a quick job to come in there and sit down and get at it.
.Jlh Were there behind-the-scenes kinds of things when you were a commissioner?
FB: No, we were wide open. We didn't care what people knew. We wanted the people to know it.
HB: You never went into any and met before you
went in. You just went in and took it as it came.
FB: We'd go in there in that place where there's a meeting now, we'd sit down, and from there we'd start. We didn't have any shenanigans going behind the doors. No. I don't know. I hate to see what they're doing up there. Seems like it's getting worse. Now they want to put the bell back on top of the courthouse, want to get it fixed. And the thing's no good
Baldwin 53
up there. The people in Bel Air had shot the pigeons, and it was metal around those posts. When they put a hole through it and water got in there, it deteriorated all those posts in under there. They were going to spend twenty thousand dollars or more to fix it, and I took it down for eight hundred and twelve dollars and fifteen cents, because I had taught this man how to play soccer years ago. But it's a shame. I don't know what they're going to do with all that building, but they're building. That thing's going to be two stories in the ground.
JN: Did you enjoy working with Mr. Coburn and Mr. O'Neill?
FE: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
HB: You went every Tuesday when they met. But you met more than
FE: Oh, yes, but we got along fine.
NB: And you said John Worthington
and you didn't have to go into a back room and
FE: That's right. We had lunch at the Hickory Inn. [chuckles]
Everybody was there to see what we were doing.
.Th: Have the newspapers always been real involved in what the county's
doing?
HE: Not as Didn't have so much to talk about.
TM: Because it seems like now, if I were to -- I just see lots
and lots of interest groups, you know, from all kinds of different
areas, working through the Council, and I just wondered whether
you had that kind of thing.
PB: We all paid our check. When we went out to lunch or dinner
or anything, we paid our own check. We didn't have one guy
Baldwin .54
sign it for the whole group. When they're signing fora whole group, the county's paying for it. We paid it out of our own pockets. We didn't ask nobody to pay our lunch time or noontime or whatever it was. It's a shame what's going on. I don't know anything else.
HB: Maybe he might have another question that might help you to think.
3M: What about Aberdeen? How different is it now?
FB: Altogether different. Altogether different now. Nothing like it used to be.
HB: In looks or anything. Stores, nothing. People.
FB: When I was in charge of Aberdeen, the streets were swept every morning, and I bought a truck like a garbage truck and I put a thing on the side to suck the dirt out of the gutter. -The housing corporation up here, I told those people to all rake the leaves in the streets. Tell those people to rake the leaves in the street and we'd get them. One afternoon, we'd clean them all up, because this thing would just suck it right up. Besides being a garbage truck when we needed it, it was a street cleaner. Every morning it was out on the streets and just cleaned this garbage back. When you needed long pipe to haul, you just stuck it in that garbage truck. Then you'd bring it out and just roll it right back out of the thing. But that garbage truck would pack those leaves so tight, that eight and ten foot of leaves would come out like a gumwad and not falling off. Now, they got three trucks running around there, and they sold it for five hundred dollars.
HB: That was eight thousand dollars.
Baldwin .5.5
FB: Yes, they sold it for five hundred dollars, just to get it out of the yard. And the machine. The machine was worth twenty-seven hundred, the leaf-sucker. I told them when a man wanted to sell me that leaf-sucker, I said, "I'm not going to pay you no big price, but I'll try to sell this thing for you." And people would call me up from Rising Sun, Oxford, Pennsylvania, "What about that truck?" I said, "Fine, that machine. See, you sit on the fender." Now what they do is they pile the stuff up in a duinptruck, run down to the dump and dump it.
HB: And lose half of it.
FB: On the dumptruck. [chuckles] It's really a shame. I had twenty-four men. I had twenty colored men and four white men, and when Hazel was in Florida (she used to have to go to Florida in the wintertime), most of the time I had a pot of soup up there for them every lunchtime. Everybody would get a bowl or a cup of soup. To get the minds going good, we'd start playing checkers. No, this was after work. So after work we'd sit there. I didn't have no place to go and some of the men didn't have no place to go. We'd sit there until five-thirty, six o'clock, playing checkers. Keep their minds going. So what did they do? The commissioners came up there one day and saw these checkerboards. They said, "You guys get rid of those checkerboards. Too much fooling around here." I said, "No fooling til after work here." And they were snapping into it, just like they're smart. I can't tell you what I'm going to say on this. Turn this thing off.
[interview interrupted]
J1: Weren't both of you actively involved in getting the flags
fln 1 dwin 56
put up? Isn't that a project that you all --
HB: What flags? For the Bicentennial?
.711: The flags that they put on for the Route 40 and then up on
RB: You're speaking of the Bicentennial flags.
J1(: Yes.
HB: I was county chairman. State county chairman, for the
Bicentennial. General , he took Aberdeen. We
had three municipal towns. Aberdeen, and
Bel Air. Jack had Aberdeen. He is the one that
worked on that. I don't want to take the credit for that. They were all under me, but he's the one that interceded and had that done.
FB: You're going to have to cone back and put her on tape.
JM: I know. -
FB: I won't be on that, because she can do it all herself.
JM: [chuckles] But you can help her think of things.
FB: I thank you for coming down here. You want to quit it now?
I thank you for coming down here, because this is the first
time anybody's ever come down and interviewed and got a story like this from me.
[interview interrupted]
Senator James' father was a professional ballplayer down south. Roy James. A group of them left Aberdeen to help build the Panama Canal. When the Panama Canal was finished, they started playing bnll up through the country to get home. To make money to get home. There were about four or five from Aberdeen; I can't name them all. But I know Billy James' father was one of
S
Baldwin 57
them, and he started me to play ball in 1920 in Aberdeen when I was fifteen years old. They were kicking on the Kid, and he said, "That Kid's got more guts than all of you big ones.' It used to just be a combination who was going to play on these ball clubs. Billy James' father was a really good ballplayer, and he's the one that started me in 1920 to play bi1l, in the Susquehanna League, when I was fifteen years old.
HB: You honored Billy's father Roy James at your Oldtiners meeting, a year ago,
PB: Yes, at the Oldtlners' Baseball meeting. That's what we're trying to do for people that help out and do things like this,
to honor them. Davis. He was a good ballplayer
around there. He came down there last year, and he brought four or five fellows from the Phillies, in the Phillies front office. And he brought four or five fellows from this big-
league club, was from Rising Sun. He played
with us. He went to Wake Forest. He was a fine guy. But he's sitting right in that Phillies front office.
HB: And Joe Gilbert used to play with you.
FE: Oh, yes. That piece of paper had Joe Gilbert,
They were all good
ballplayers. But it's just not like it used to be. Everything's turned topsy
HB: It's a wonderful thing when we go out and these young boys that were young boys when our son was about the same age, all going
around together, they still come up and say, "Hazie, how are
Baldwin 58
you?
[all, laugh]
We still receive cards from all over the United States from
a lot of those boys with our
children chaperones from
dances.
And I'd do it all over again.
FB: From '37 to the end of '45, she ran the works. Had all the kids in town would come down here in the yard and would play on the ground, and she took care of everything. I couldn't. I was
HB: When they had this junior prom, seniors, they had this one wheelbarrow
FB: And we got the flowers and everything.
HB: All the flowers I had, and got the flowers and stuck
FB: No, sir. I never regretted any of it. They used to whistle at me to come out here. She'd say, "Who was whistling?" One night I walked down the road, and there were all these young kids out there, and I got in there and I started whistling. [laughs] She couldn't pick this whistle out. She knew it was strange, but she didn • t know it was me whistling in the group.
HB: It was a game we played. They'd go and you'd close your eyes and they'd go hide different places, and you'd call fictitious names or something you'd call out or whatever, and you had to identify them.
End of Interview

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Transcript

INTERVIEW WITH FRED BALDWIN, SR.
Interview by James Massey, Harford County Library, July 21, 1981
Massey: First of all, you were born right here in Aberdeen?
Baldwin: Might as well say Aberdeen
[interview interrupted]
JM: I want to find out a little bit about who your parents were,
and where did they live, and what did they do?
FB: My father was man. He had stores all over, and that's
where the business went, from here to -- He went and married my mother in New Jersey, and he kept working up to Jersey and New York state and ended up in Buffalo, the main places. He had stores in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse; Erie, Pennsylvania. I don't know just all of them. So my mother moved back here in 1904 or '05, and I was born in 1905- January 7, 1905, just on the edge of Aberdeen, up near Swan Creek.
[interview interrupted]
314: What were their names?
PB: Mary Jane Farley and Joseph Robertson Baldwin.
And he was the son of Timothy Baldwin and Mary Ann
And they were Harford County people, Freddy.
FE: Well, it's all Harford County, the Baidwins.
s They came here in the sixties.
FE: This is where the dividing line, out in front of the house, of where
the Civil War was. On the other side was the North; on this
side, it was the South.
314: Now why was that?
Baldwin 2
FB: It divided the county. And then the state or whatever. What
they would do [is], they would desert from the North and join
the South. But then they would desert back to the North. One
story my father told me -- or somebody told me; some of the
B1dwins, anyhow, told me -- was that this little guy --
My father's father was a large man; my father's brother was a
small man. So he was married to a six-foot woman. When the
South came in after him, he got under her hoop skirt. They
never did find him. [all chuckle] And that's what saved him,
the hoop skirt, standing under this big woman's hoop skirt.
They never did find him. My father's father was wounded, and
then he died. He's buried in Abington
JM: Where did you grow up?
FB: Right over there. Just across the road. I grew up there and
went to Aberdeen High School. From Aberdeen High School, I
went to Calvert Hall. Then from Calvert Hall, I went down to
Eastern Maryland for Homerun Baker to play bal 1 • I was there until
Homerun Baker quit, and then they brought this Buck Herzog in
there to manage the ball club. I had beaten his team when I'd
played ball for the Proving Ground when I was with Sargeant
Snyder, for the Second Army Championship, and that old bird kept
a grudge on me the rest of his life. I was there three days
with him and then he fired me because I stole second base. He
didn't even know my batting average or anything else -- and I
never knew my batting avenge -- so here a while back, I got
the batting avenge from a book. I was hitting .294 and fielding
.999, but he let me go. Anyhow, after that -- in 1926 -- I went
with the Orioles, they signed me. I went south with the Orioles
S
a.¬ Baldwin 3
and slid into second base and tore my leg apart. Never got
me a doctor, so I let that be. They sent me home. Two years
later, they tried to get me to sign up again, and I told them,
"Nothing doing," From then on, I played ball around the
county and around Baltimore city, and different places. I
was in Chattanooga and I was up in Pennsylvania and different
places like that, playing ball. [pauses] So, when I cane
back from Oriole cap, I started working with a plumber and
I turned out to be a master plumber myself. For years, I was
in plumbing and heating and everything. The [First World]
War started and they were getting soldiers in here. I went to
the Proving Ground, and I was in charge down there for seven
and a half years, day and night. Hazel took care of the house
and the family and everything, day and night, because I was there
sometimes twenty hours at a time, sometimes forty hours at a
time. So it just kept going and going like this. Then I was
Superintendent of the town for ten years, until
bought -- [pauses] the property over there.
Swan Meadow.
FB: Swan Meadow. Bought those two hundred and ninety-nine houses,
and I left the town and went to take to charge of all of that.
We have about seven hundred houses and apartments. For the last
twenty years, I haven't been doing anything but just going
around. Then I was Commissioner, you know, a couple times.
I was a Commissioner for the town of Aberdeen three times.
(I'll tell you, She can do this, but I
get something like this, I just hush up.)
4
4
V Baldwin 4
FB: t966, when I was a Commissioner. Yes, that's where it starts. You ran four times for County Commissioner, Fred.
TM: And then you were a County Councilman.
FB: Yes, I was County Councilman a couple of times.
FB: That was in '72, when the Council came in. And I was Chairman of the Board there, for a while. But I'm not used to all this talking like this.
TM: Let's go back. What do you remember, as a child growing up here in Aberdeen? What was it like?
FB: Everything was horses and buggies. Very few cars. We had the first car that Henry Ford made, a six cylinder. My father and Henry Ford were buddies in Buffalo, and Henry Ford wanted my father to go with him. He said, "Henry, I've got five kids. can't take a chance on this." So Henry Ford had a place no larger than this room here, where he first made the first car, in Buffalo, and my father got it. Now, that car is in exhibition in Deerboni [Michigan], sitting right up there: the first six-cylinder Ford that was made. It's sitting there in exhibition someplace; I haven't seen it. In the Ford Museum. Then my brother went out there to work for Henry Ford later on. His
oldest son and Henry Ford's -- one of the Ford sons --
became buddies, and that young fellow, he went to work for Henry Ford for years • For about ten years, he had charge of everything in England for him, and he retired from the Ford Company. A great big salary, retired on it. Two years later, the young guy cane and got him again to go out to Detroit and take charge of some big tank deal they had out there in Detroit.
-L
Baldwin 5
We never see him, very seldom see him. So that's where
that young Charles Baldwin is working now. If you're ever
out there in that museum, there's the first Ford. There were
only four cars with tops on them here in those days. A millionaire
had one, and there two more
Well, your father was a millionaire.
FE: Well, I'm talking about now. They use to get racing
one another up and down these old roads, and they caught one of them doing fifty miles an hour, and they thought they were going to crucify him. Fifty miles an hour in that old car. And you remember your father and Teddy Roosevelt.
FE: My father and Teddy Roosevelt were buddies. If the President had let Teddy Roosevelt take an army to France to fight the Germans -- he had a hundred thousand men signed with him -- but the President thought that Teddy Roosevelt would be elected President the next time if he allowed it, so he wouldn't allow it. My brother joined the Marine Corps, and he --
Brother Joe.
FB: Joe; named after my father. They sent him down here to the training camp and they saw he was so good with a rifle, they had him on the first ship going. They went out of New York five times before they finally headed to England, on account of the suhaarines • The Germans had submarines all over the ocean in those days. He went over there and he got one of the highest honors could offer in 1919. He and another sargeant came home
from Tennessee and General reviewed the troops at
Proving Ground. My brother and this other Marine sargeant
V
4
Baldwin 6
walked down the Platform. He left his escort and went over - and put his arms around hint. Said, "If it wasn't for these kind of men, I wouldn't be here today." The Marines are what saved them. Teddy Roosevelt's son joined the Air Corps, and he was shot down by the Germans.
Kermit.
FB: Yes, Kermit. And the Germans buried him with honors, mind you, after knowing who he was. After shooting him down, they buried him with honors. But I've never heard of this. In 1939, France sent my brother one of the highest honors of the country. In 1939, after twenty years coming home from the War. My brother's dead now. All dead but two sisters.
JN: Did they all grow up right here in Aberdeen?
FE: Yes, they did. -
JMi What was your home life like? Did you have chores and things to do?
FE: I had chores to do. [chuckles] I had chores since I was seven years old. I've been firing fireplaces since I was seven years old, and one of them was over there in the big room. We had a family room that was twenty-six [feet] by thirty [feet]. It had a fireplace in the end of it. It was a game room. It had a regulation pool table. I said right then, "If I ever build a fireplace, I'd sink it in the floor." Because when I was firing a fireplace -- we didn't have a screen or anything in those days -- a spark got on the floor and my backside got it. So that's why I sunk this fireplace. It's fifteen inches from where you step out of that room there to the bottom of that
V
Baldwin 7
fireplace. It will circulate eighty feet away, and one minute in and one minute out to get it lighted. So if you ever build a house, don't build a hearth on it, because you've got that much cold air. There's no cold air there. You can see how I've rigged it up to keep the spRrk and everything. We go to bed at night, and that's a fireplace that won't heat this furniture, won't heat that furniture.
JMi Let's see -- Where did you go to school?
FB: Aberdeen High School.
JMu Didn't you once go to the school that was near the railroad track, too?
FBz That's the one.
No, that wasn't that. Miss Morgan had a school.
FBI Oh, I went to private school. Yes, right by the bottle shop up there. I'd forgotten that. You must have told him that.
JM: Somebody I interviewed told me a little story about you and getting in trouble in school. They used to say that you were ornery. Were you ornery in elementary school?
FB: Well, I wasn't ornery, but the teachers -- When the Baidwins first came here, they blamed the Th1 dwins for everything. My brothers always got the blame, so when I came along, I got the blame. Finally the teacher came up to me one day and. said, "Freddy, I don't think you're doing all, this." And from that time on, I was altogether different to them. But they had blamed all my -brothers before I got there. I had a brother [who was] as ornery as could be in that school, but I just went along until they found out that I wasn't.
s Well, your son, when he came up, they
FB: Yes, same thing.
They've been jealous because your father associated with the people he did and
FB: They didn't want anybody who had any money to tell them
anything. The teachers finally found out it wasn't
Freddy Baldwin doing it all. They wouldn't look around the room. "Freddy Baldwin!" I'd say, "Yes, Ma'am." So one day I said to her, "Now just what were you caning me for?" I didn't even know what she called me for; I'd. say, "Yes, Ma'am." But that was only kid stuff, because all the principals and everybody, we were good friends. Mr. Davis, he was here in
Aberdeen; Willard Davis. His brother was
He had another brother in ; Princeton was
the school. We all got along fine. Then I went to Calvert Hall and got along fine at Calvert Hall,
JMs When did you get interested in playing baseball?
PB: When I was thirteen, I played for this high school team. When I was thirteen, and we had five left-handed bt 11 players on that team. The first hnseman, the catcher, the third. baseman -¬I played second, in those days -- and the pitcher. [chuckles] So we had a good ban team. We didn't have any coaches. It was just the principal. I ended up being the coach. In 1922 or '23, we won the county championship, out where the shopping center is now, where the racetrack used to be in Bellaire. We won the county championship by ten points. Never thought little Aberdeen would win the thing, but we won it.
314: Now in those days, did each community have a baseball team of their own?
Baldwin 9
FB: , Aberdeen, Bellaire --
FE: And Jarrettsvllle. Yes, these schools. Janettsville and Hollins. That was most of them. I think Darlington got in on it one or two times. They were small, but they had a good ic'11
team. That's one thing about : they had all
good ballplayers. They had their own. A lot of these other teams like Rising Sun and Prairieville, they hired the hall-players. They had big leaguers in there pitching.
FB: This is Susquehanna League I'm talking about, now. I played for Bellaire in 1926. I was playing for Bellaire, and that was one of the best ball teams that was around here. Mike Caine was the catcher; Roy Coe was a pitcher and first baseman. The judge's father -- in Bellaire. [pauses] Fkldie he played shortstop for Bellaire. Tom Stearns played the outfield; Paul Stearns played the outfield. I played the
outfield, and I pitched, too. And Father from
Baltimore, he played for Bellaire that year.
He was originally from
YB: Yes. He's still in good shape, and he's seventy-five years old. And a McMahon; there was a McMahon that played. I think McNutt was up there, too; he was a good pitcher. We won the championship, and according to John O'Neill's father .-
I can't find the scorebooks, bit -- he said I hit .556. That's
when the Orioles signed me. It wasn't any-thing for one of these big-league ballplayers to come down here and get five
Baldwin 10
hundred dollars a Saturday to pitch against these teams like
Bellaire. And we'd still beat them. We'd still beat them.
: Then after World War Two, the boys came home.
FB: Well, after I quit the Proving Ground.-- I was down there for
seven and a half years -- I came home and we started a team --
After World War Two,
FB: Yes, "+6. In '46, we started a team. I hadn't played in all
those years, and I just thought, "Well, put the younger guys
in there," and they lost nine ballgaines. The people putting
the money up there said, "You get in there and play ball. You're
not too old to play ball." We went in and won the next fifteen
and we won the pennant.
Those boys changed when you went in there. They were nervous
and
PT: Yes, and they were an young guys. There's one of their pictures
in there on that --
Joe Lee and Oliver Ripley and Bill Whitman and
FE: Billy Ripton and Wally Ripton and Frankie Miller; all that
crowd. We won for two years straight, and then we got second
the next year. It just kind of faded out. I went over to
and run the team for and we won
there for a year or two. Satchel Paige and All the pro colored guys were over there, and I beat them.
That was before '42.
FE: Yes. No, wait a minute.
Sure. That was when you first started out in the thirties. FTh '33 or '34. And I beat them. Three straight ballgaxaes. How much money do you think was bet on those three straight ball-
Baldwin 11
games? Ten thousand dollars. A man told us last year in
Ocean City; he was the man who held all the money. That's the reason they never played any more.
But that was an all-colored team, Satchel Paige and the Baltimore Black Sox.
PB: Yes, that was all pro. Baltimore Black Sox six and Baltimore Black Sox -- two from Homestead Grays and two from in New York, plus Satchel Paige. And this Johnson, that they put in the white Hall of Fame here, a couple of years ago, he played third base for them that day. What made us win was, old Ed Banks -- he'd be about a hundred and five, a hundred and ten now if he was living -- He was at all the bfllga.rnes I ever played in this county, and sometimes I'd take him if he didn't have a ride. He stood back of those colored fellows. -I never warned up on the sideline; I warned up to our own batters. If you wanted to come in and bat, I'd let you come in and bat, and there was no way you could hit. Old Ed Banks stood behind them and he said -- I can't say what he said, because I don't want this on tape. He told them, he saw me kill a man with a ball. So I told Stu Preston, who was going over to play with Aberdeen after this, "Don't reach for the first ball. I'm going to throw it over your head." So I threw the ball in there and it hit the backstop so hard it went forty or fifty feet in the air, and the second baseman caught it thirty or forty feet behind second base on a fly, and they thought he swung at it. They called him a certain name and asked him why he hit at it. He said, "You see that bat? I never moved it. So I ended up striking out seventeen, on one-to-nothing. We played the next
BPI dwin 12
Sunday and we beat them two-to-one. The third Sunday, we beat them three-to-two or something like that. I never knew why they didn't play, but a man -- I met him in Ocean City a couple, three years ago -- he said why they didn't play any more. It was because they'd lost all their money. Satchel Paige went wound to these schools, telling these schools that the only white man who ever beat him in three ballga.mes was Freddy iRa] dwin. I have a boy working for me now who used to go to school when he heard that. He didn't know me then, see. But we used to have a real good ball club.
Now you have to name the man you're talking about.
FB: Hal Copley. He went to Western Maryland, and the story I got
FB: No, he went to Tome, up in --
FB: He went to Tome, and first he was in the Prairieville, and
Mrs. used to pay him five cents a day to come
to school. [chuckles] Then after he got out of Prairieville, he went to Tome, and he was a star at Tome, for football, I think. Western Maryland took him, and that's when DiCarla was there. The story I got was that he married a girl at Western Maryland -- the president's daughter or something -¬and they kicked him out before he got his last degree. Then I tried to get him a job with a fellow I knew in North
He got in the car and was going down there, and he wrecked the car in Churchville, so he never went. Anyhow, one of his buddies from Western Maryland was coaching Rhode Island. No -¬Eastern Boston College. So he asked Copley to come up there and
Baldwin i
go to school to get his other degiee, and help hint on the
side with the football team. As soon as Copley got the
degree, Dick Harlow took him to Harvard with him as a coach.
And Hickman -- you've heard of Hickman -- Hickman and Dick
Harlow were at Harvard. So then, after a certain amount of
years, Dick Harlow quit, and Copley got the job at --
$ Ohio or some place?
FB: He got the job at one of those colleges around Boston there
or something. He wins the division championship. Then he went
to Massachusetts, and he won the division championship there.
Then he went to Brigham Young, and he won a couple division
championships at Brigham Young. But then he went in the service.
I think he was wounded from World War Two. But now he's back
in Rhode Island, and one of the fellows he used to coach has a
job at Rhode Island University and Copley' a there every day
from three o'clock to six in the evening, helping him with
those teams. One of the nicest guys you'd ever see, and
when we had the oldtiners party here -- Harford
Oldtimers -- of course, we were going to honor Copley. I
didn't tell him this, but I got Mrs • Thurland, who's eighty-
three or eighty-four. I told her he was coming down, and for
her to come over. I gave a picnic.
a She
FBi And we didn't want them to meet until we honored him. That
was pretty good. He came in there and he had this thing, so
he got talking to me. I said to Copley, 'Where's your wife?"
He said, "Over there." She was sitting just across the table
from Mrs • Thurland. Of course, she didn't know Mrs • Thurland.
Baldwin 14
And when Copley got finished talking, he came over and sat
down. Now, he's six-foot-two, at least; a powerful big
guy. No fat or anything. And Mrs. Thurland wasn't supposed
to see him until we presented this thing --
And if you ask me,
PB: Well, Copley was sitting down across the table, not saying
nothing until the tears came right down his eyes.
And she jumped up and kissed him.
FBI And she jumped up and kissed him. [chuckles]
Didn't wait.
PB: She didn't wait until he got out there. But you know, at
her age, she danced two dances with him. I'm telling you,
that's some woman, too. Poor old thing, now she got operated
on for her hip or something.
She's a diabetic.
PB' She was great. You want a real man, that Copley. You'll be
around here in February, won't you?
TM: Yes.
FBI How about coming over to one of our parties? I'll give you a
ticket.
JM: I think that'd be interesting.
FBI We've had as high as four hundred and, ten people there.
We could have more, but there's no room.
FR: We don't have any more room in there. We have them from all over.
JM: Now how did that get started?
FBi I started it with two fellows from Rising Sun. That plaque in
there, you read that. That's how it got started.
Baldwin 15
You also formed the Oldtimers Baseball
Association, not just baseball.
RB: Yes, the County Oldtimers Baseball Association.
Th: And what does it try to do?
FE: Just try to have a dinner so everybody will meet at least once a year, and present people with different trophies and things.
the oldtiners that come, and
they're supposed to send
FE: Yes. Some of them are not, but --
That was the formula.
FE: They found out that so many of them are dropping off that
they'd better before their service.
But you had speakers come from different places, different
things. You got different speakers.
FE: Three years ago, we had a couple come in from California, and
one from Seattle, and one from someplace else out on the coast.
From Arizona, five came in last year.
FB: From Arizona, yes, five, last year. And we've had them from
Alabama, Texas. Just to come to that one party.
: Yes, but they were from here.
FE. They were originally from here, yes.
And their husbands played b1l, or they played b1l.
FE: They were all ex-ballplayers.
Yes, but he asked you tether you take the money. It's not a
money-making thing.
PB: Oh, no, no, we're not --
[end of side one, tape one]
Baldwin 16
I said that too. It's not to make money. It's just to get together.
You take that money and divide it between
Harford Community College and the Harford Community College in
Cecile -- well, say it.
FB: Yes. We give each one of them a hundred and ten dollars a year.
Cecile County and Harford County.
College. Community Colleges.
FB: Junior colleges.
JI'!: Why do you think there was so much of an interest in baseball
during the thirties and forties?
FE: Well, you didn't have cars to run around and raise -- just no
television.
And you didn't have the leniency in the family and in the world
that you have today.
FE: It wasn't anything to see five hundred or a thousand people at
these ballgames around here.
I think people took a little pride in their families. They did
care what they were doing.
FE: That's right. They would bet money.
3M: It sounds like it was a real social event to have the whole
community come out and be a part of it.
FE: Oh yes, yes.
It was all these ballplayers wives and own families and people
that associate and kept coming tack.
FE: We won the championship in 147 against Western High, and Dave
and I just said, "Everybody down at the house." I'll bet we
Baldwin 17
had a hundred people around that garage that evening. All of the good ballplayers were from around this section of and Harford County.
Well, they were the leading families of the county.
That's right. But they started playing ball from the time they were little kids on up, and they kept right on going. This Calvin Ripkin who is third base coach for Baltimore, we used to have him when he was ten years old and I was a scout for Brooklyn, in those days. He was my batboy up here when we had a team, and he was giving the signals for me when the people were watching me. He was giving the signals, what I'd told him to give to those players. So he blows how to give signals. The best one of those ballplayers was Oliver. He's up at
Lumberyard. But he went in the War, and he
jumped in Germany and the phosphorous gas got in his ears. Every once in a while, this little pup up in
He was catching one day in Aberdeen and I'm playing center field, and he falls over. I run in there and kneeled down to him and he said, "I didn't tell you, Freddy." And that's what it was. Every so often it struck. But this young Calvin's son, you read about him. Now he's about the size of Oliver, and he's got the spirit of Oliver, so I'm sure he'll make it in the big leagues, because Oliver could, have made it anyplace.
Bill was a good player, too, but he was Mama's --
JMs Did you have any idea you wanted to play for the Orioles? Was
that something you had in mind to do? Did they come up and seek you?
Ila 1 dwin 18
FB: No, they came for me.
Your father didn't want you to play ball at all.
FB: No, my father didn't want me to play ball. But anyhow, they came to me, and I played on the best teams in Baltimore, on Sundays. See, yan vs ago they didn't have Sundays out here, and then they started Sundays. In '26, I played the
where they used to have the circus cground in Baltimore. Then I went with the Orioles and hurt my leg so I couldn't play for two years. I ended up playing for Bloomingdale on Sundays, in West Baltimore. The players who would play up here at this thing on a Saturday from Philadelphia and different places, I would go to Baltimore with them, back and forth. That was my way of getting back and forth to Baltimore. Three of them from Philadelphia: Quinney, Gorey and
Actually, a Homestead team beat the Orioles. I played with Homestead in '37, but they were beating the Orioles before I played with them. And Charlie Keller was playing with the Homestead when I was playing with them in '37. Then he went with the big league career. Three or four of them --
At the time you took your new recruits and in early or late 'Lo and to Annapolis and beat the plebes.
FBi Oh, yes. We took this Aberdeen team and --
Who had just come back from the Army
VB: And when Max Bishop was coach out there at the Naval Academy. He promised us that if we'd come down there and play, that as soon as the inilgame was over, we could have our dinner. The wives and all the friends we'd take down there. So we beat them
Baldwin 19
eight-to-one, and they asaid, "You won't eat until six o'clock." I told them, "The hell with you,' and we ate at a place along the road, one of these nice places along the road. There must have been thirty of us. But they never asked us back to play no more.
Because they gave you a check for twenty-five dollars that bounced.
FB: Well, yes. They did give us a check for twenty-five dollars, and it bounced. [all chuckle] We never did go back there. Between Hazel and I, we've sent seventeen kids to college through schoThrships and different things and help, we got them in and got them out. We've always helped all the kids, no
matter from Aberdeen, area, wherever a kid needs
help, we'd help them. And when I was commissioner, I got
the lights up at Edgewood High School. They wanted two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and I got them up there for eighty-five thousand. I mean, eighty-five hundred. And they wanted two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Eighty-five hundred. And the bell.
FB: Oh, and the bell on the courthouse. They wanted twenty thousand dollars to take it off the top of the courthouse, and a man that I showed how to play soccer thirty or forty years before, he was a contractor, and he helped me and we took it off for eight hundred and twelve dollars and fifteen cents,
FE: That's right. And where they had the handicapped children in
Belaire at the church, I got that church for -- I think --eighty thousand dollars for the county when they wanted a
Baldwin 20
hundred and fifty thousand for it • Certain guy wanted a hundred and fifty, and I got it for eighty thousand. I also
collected for this fountain for -- that's
in later years. I was up there yesterday, and there's two
men painting in the courthouse, and there's two men out there
scratching around the grounds. I asked them what they were
hunting for. They were hunting for the electric [cable] for
the fountain. So I guess they're going to put the fountain
up there. There's so many things that I've helped out with,
that I just can't recall all of them.
.311: How did you decide to get involved in politics and serving
as a councilman?
FE: People cane to me and asked me. I had no idea of trying to
get into any politics. They came to me and asked me to run.
They still ask him to run.
FE: Yes, that's right. They still ask me. [chuckles]
And what do I tell them?
FE: You'll kill them. [laughs]
No, I don't. What do I tell them, Freddy? The only running
you'll get is from your wife, and you'll run.
FE: Well, that's going to kill them, isn't it? [laughs] It's
terrible.
314: Well, how has Aberdeen changed?
FE: Q-i, my. It's completely turned over.
: You wouldn't know it.
3M: What was it like growing up here?
FE: Well, in the wintertime we used to have sleigh races from the
railroad to the stop light on Route LQ• They
?21 dwin 21
had the fast horses here, too. Dan Patch was raised right out here on that field. They had fast horses. Out at the racetrack one time out there -- a private track, Mr. Baker's. C.W. Baker ovned it. And every afternoon at two o'clock, you'd see five or six or seven fine-looking horses, fast horses up along sleighs. They would stop -- the finish line was a store, Hanway and Gibson's store, right where the stopi gh is now going down the road. That would be the finish line. It would take them from there to the railroad track to get around and stop those horses, they were coming down there so fast. That was an everyday occurrence in the wintertime; snow on the ground all the time, aLL], winter long. My father went up to Aberdeen one Saturday afternoon, walked up. It was snowing. And he never got back until the next day afternoon about five o'clock, there was so much snow coming down. In front of this schoolhouse was a bank and rail fence, and, he was coming down walking the fence to get back over here. [chuckles] 5° it used to really snow here • Half the Proving Ground down here, the only thing opened up down there was where the big tanks could come up and knock the snow down. This was the only road at first, out here. Our brown house which is over there now -¬it's not our now, but -- the government took our big home over here, the commander, and made an office out of it. So my people moved over to this log house which was one of the oldest houses in this town.
Baldwin 22
any soldier walking up and down this road was allowed to come in and get coffee or cake or whatever we had there. So this is funny. My son married a girl from Rochester, and I was up there in Rochester, and I went in the barber shop one day. A fellow said, "I've never seen you in here. Where are you from?" I said, "Aberdeen," "Oh," he said. "My God," he said, "I was in Aberdeen and all the snow in 1917 or '18," he said, "and there used to be a brown house down the road that would give us coffee and cake and different things to eat." He said, "Would you know who they were?" I said, "Yes, I was the kid giving it to you." [chuckles] But he'd remembered it from 1918 to 1952.
To 1950.
FE: But this was the only place that would give them anything to eat, up and down the road.
Your mother was the first USO here.
FE: She made homemade bread and cake and things like that. When the first USO -- After I quit the Proving Ground, we'd have dances up there, and the soldiers were allowed to come in, at the old Aberdeen High School there on Route 40.
FBI That's right. When I was at the Proving Ground for seven and a half years, she took care of everything, and all of the kids from around this section used to be out there. We put a play-room up. We put it downstairs first and then we put a top on it, and it used to be going. They were good kids.
114: Was this a big farming community?
FE: Always was. But all
Baldwin 23
that Proving Ground was farming. When Agnew was in as Vice - President, I had this whole field behind here all signed and ready to go for a veterans' cemetery. When he got out, they just killed it, just like that. You could bury ten thousand people out there, and they don't have anyplace on the Proving Ground to bury anybody. And they just squashed it. That would have been the place to have it. But now what do they do with
it? They're not doing anything with it. was over
there, and you've been over to That play ball
over here on the field.
the girls and boys got out of high school,
you started the softball and basketball for women; sane with
the boys and the men.
FBt Yes, I put the first basketball court in Aberdeen High School
on that road.
Then you had town boys and girls, when they got out of high
school and didn't go on, wanted to play, and you carried them
on. Soccer, baseball, football, basketball.
FB: Yes, we've been going all the time like this. We had a girls'
softball team, had lights set up on the old diamond there by the
old high school on the road.
This was town, then. They were out of school.
PB: It was a town thing. And we had a men's team there. When the
men would play, they might have a hundred and fifty people out
there. When the girls would play, they • d have two hundred, two
hundred and fifty people watching the girls play, and that's
when I was scouting for Brooklyn. Max Terrier, the great bl1player
Baldwin 24
from Brooklyn, he wanted to take Ben Ray's daughter -- that's the chief of police's daughter -- and our daughter to Brooklyn, to go on a professional softball team.
Girls' softball.
FB: And that's one time I would have been killed. [chuckles]
But we used to have crowds out there. Saturdays and Sundays, when we finally started playing Sunday ball. And holidays. That place would be crowded. From all over, Edgewood and Bel¬laire and every-place else, to the h 1 lgame -- plus Aberdeen.
putting the first basketball in
that auditorium. Aberdeen High School never had it.
PB: Reverend was coach for the girls.
Presbyterian minister.
PT: I put the board up there. It was in the school, and I asked
Mr. Wright, Mr. Willis. He said, "If you can do it, do it." So I crawled in the top of that ceiling -- I'd never been in there before -- and saw a beam up there. The beam just happened to be right in the center of the room. I got clamps made to clamp the steel pipe in the basketball thing up there. Then they set up on the stage, the spectators sat on the stages, the way they used to do. They had bleachers up there. That was a hot going every-thing too. We've had a time with these children. Those kids just loved us and we loved them.
I Well, there was only two cars when they were in high school to transport that took them to the games. There were no buses. You and I drove and took them.
PT: Hazel would drive the car and I'd drive my panel truck. See, I
Baldwin 25
was a registered plumber. I had seats -- I had where I put my tools down and I'd take them out and they'd put all their stuff in there. We'd take them all over the state. We never regretted it, all those children.
Well, the parents just didn't bother. There was no other way.
PT: In '52, we knew all the players that played the Yankees in the World Series with Brooklyn. We'd see them down at Cambridge, where they had a club. I'd quit work wound three o'clock and get my van, truck, and get these guys who wanted to try out like the Ripkins and Deke Hall. You know Deke Hall. And all those fellows, and we'd take them down there for tryouts, and that's how they got started.
That's where the with the Dodgers.
FE: That was the Dodgers' farm team. And all those fellows who
played in the '52 World Series, we knew every one of them. We hear some of them asking about us.
And Deke Hall, I found out where he's, what he's doing. He's working for the city of Baltimore now, in some athletic thing.
We stayed at a hotel down there. In Cambridge. And the boys,
you know, they'd want to keep carrying on and everything. They told us, they said, "We're not going to let them in here if you don't really make them behave." So one of the last times we were down there, Hazel and I were in one room on one side of the hall, and there was thirteen of them in the other room. It was a great big room.
On cots,
FE: And I heard a noise over there about twelve-thirty, one o'clock and I got up and went over in that room, and that big Deke Hall,
Baldwin 26
he was that much too long for the single bed he was in. He had the pillow over his head and the blanket up there, and I said, "Boy, what are you up to?" They had poured liniment down his back -- this Buddy Buingaurd, the plumber -- they had poured liniment down his back. [laughs] They said, "He's out doing the beach." I went out there and it was moonlight, and you could see mosquitoes as big as my little finger on him. Instead of getting in the water and sitting down in the water, he was taking the water and splashing it on him. It wasn't doing any good. That was one of the last years, I guess, we were down there. Cambridge. They gave up on Cambridge. We didn't have no more to go down. But we've always helped every¬body.
Then you went to scout for Rex Cohen.
FB: Then I went scouting for Cincinnati. Rex Cohen and two fellows used to do the booking for Cincinnati. Joe -- Rex's brother --was his second-in-command. Now, Joe's the head man in command at Cincinnati, and one of them is with Pittsburgh. I think it's Rex with Pittsburgh. I heard that a couple of weeks or so ago.
Both of them were schoolteachers.
FB: Yes, they were both schoolteachers. They left schoolteaching to be scouts. As I say, the best thing is when I married Hazel, we did buddy-buddy together, help out kids everyplace we could. Help out anybody everyplace we could. I've gotten so many people jobs that I don't even know where I've gotten them. People come in here, "You helped my grandfather get a job,
Baldwin 2?
Mr. Baldwin. Can't you help me?" Those kind of things. You know, that makes you feel good.
JM: Do you remember when they built Route LO through Aberdeen?
FE: Oh, yes. It used to just be one single road down through there. RB: It was the old post-road.
PB: It was so narrow. Where the Grove Church is up there, that
road going down here used to be the main one from
Down where Clark Connolly and Joe Lee had the beer place,
down on the corner, that's where it came out. Right there
at that corner. There's been a lot going on since I was
first here.
HB: Freddy, they built down there. It was called Philadelphia
Road to start with, before Route 40.
FE: That's right. Right here at the crossroads up here, at this
light. You see that sign up there: 1616, or something. That's
when it was started. And this log house over here, that we own,
was right where that Presbyterian Church is now. Part of
that house is log.
RB: It was your Uncle Jared's home, your father's home. Then
the church bought the land and he moved the house onto his
land over here and built the church on the land he sold to the
church.
FE: Right on the corner there, where there's a three-apartment
house, that was a store. We had a grocery store. Sell
clothes and groceries and different things. You know how an
old-time store used to be: it would sell anything.
HBz Country store. Then in 1917 they built the house and
FE: That's right.
B 1 dwin 28
RB: Well, you say it. I'm not You say
it.
FE: They're the best-built houses in Aberdeen, this housing corporation.
Because they're built out of five-by-fours, not an inch-and-a-
hnlf-by-two. Everything in those walls are five-by-fours.
The government built all of this, for the people working on
the Proving Ground. 1917's when it was built.
JM: Did things change quite a lot in Aberdeen once the Proving
Ground opened?
FE: It was bou to; it was bound to. Most of these people came
here from New Jersey. They transferred them down from New
Jersey.
RE: New Jersey -- Morristown.
FB Morristown, yes • The old-timers were all down here. The
and the Bergers and all those people, they all came with a group from up in New Jersey. They had enough to fill all those houses, and this housing corporation
RE: And World War Two, they came and took everything. And
when got started in
World War Two. They wanted to take five acres of land up there to make single people's rooms, see. There wasn't nothing to do but let them have it. And later on, they came and took the rest of it, next year, and built all those other places. You don't remember that. They're all two-story apartments. Then here, a couple of years ago, they were deteriorating so bad the town was saying they'd have to tear them down or some¬thing, so the government cane in and built those new ones in B1dwin Manor. Called H.U.D. [Housing and Urban Development]
Baldwin 29
But it's our property that they're on.
314: Now, did you say that you rent houses? Is that it, that you have houses that you rent to people around Aberdeen?
FB: Oh, yes. I have three partners in that. We incorporated. We
have seven hundred and fifty or sixty apartments and houses. Swan Meadows, mit dwin Manor, North Dean. Apartment
HB: Winston.
FB: Winston Hall. Hillside in Aberdeen. HB: And Deli Grove.
FB: And Dell Grove, right across from We own all
of those; the corporation owns them.
311: Were a lot of them built to accomodate the people that were
coming in? -
HB: Not all. It was the built Winston Hall
FB: That was in and then they couldn't
hold onto it and they wanted to sell it.
HB- And built up there and
the built Hillside and sold them to us
FB- The government built all these houses over here. There's two
hundred and ninety-nine houses over there, Swan Meadow. The government built all of those.
HB: We owned the property near Baldwin Manor, and that's why it's called Baldwin Manor. We incorporated later, against my wishes but we did. I like to say that.
FB, was built by the government, too, and then we
bought those houses.
B8 1 dwin 30
JM: How did the people of Aberdeen receive all these new people coming in? Were they receptive, or was a little --
PB: Yes and no. If it hadn't been for these people, I don't know what they would have done. They had three grocery stores. HB: And churches of all denominations.
FIB: They had three grocery stores and a butcher shop; a couple of them. In those days -- Maybe I'd better I'd better not say what I was going to say. (Turn that thing off there.) [interview interrupted]
Forty years ago, there couldn't have been over a thousand people in the town, forty years ago • We've been married fifty-three years • I'm going on seventy-seven years old. I do all the log-splitting and cutting for that fireplace. That's a
thing, you Imow • You can go to bed with a roaring fire in that room and never touch nothing. Our furnace never comes on all night long. You don't want to hear about that, but I have twelve or thirteen cord of wood every winter out
here, but my cut it up there
I don't know what else I could tell you. I've got all kinds of
basebl1 clippings. See, I just came up as a kid.. I was
borrowed from boxing in 1935. I
was a professional -- look at this one there. I was never in the ring in my life. I had a filling station down here, from about '31 to '35, '36. Boys used to come up there, and I'd train them how to box. I never boxed. So one night over there
a man took me out of the audience about and
all this stuff. I said, could whip you right there." So
Baldwin 31
instead of the guy that said it, they got a professional to come over. There happened to be a soldier down here that was a sparring partner for Jack Dempsey when he was fighting [Gene Tunney. He was over there, and he said, "Baldwin, what are you going to do?" I said, "I'm going to fight some way or other." He said, "That guy's a professional. Don't you hit at him first." So I go out there to shake hands, you know, to be introduced, and he split my nose. He split my nose open like that. So, Spike Webb, who was a coach for the Naval Academy, he was the referee that night. I went after that joker so fast that he jumped out of the ring, out through the ropes. This fellow sitting there said, "You must have hit him fifty times." So Spike Webb said, "You're barred." I had blood still coming out of my nose, and I said to Spike, "Are you talking to me?" "Yes," I said, "Well, I'm damned glad you barred me, because my wife didn't want me over here in the
first place." But I'd whipped him. That's the first time
and last time I was ever in the ring. But that's the
way things go. We used to have an kinds of athletes in our town, everybody playing something. In 1927, they had
Dick that great pitcher for St. Louis. He was
pitching for He had won one World Series game
against the Yankees on a Thursday, but he wouldn't pitch on a Sunday, so he wasn't going to pitch on a weekend. So Mr. who owned the Mills up there, hired him to come over there to play against Bel Air. That was in '26, I think it was. Yes, it was '26. And we beat them. And he got a thousand dollars to pitch this one ballgame, and he brought the catcher along
Ba 1 dwin 32
with him. That's how they used to -- They bet all kinds of money, you know. It wasn't nothing for a man to bet a car. I've seen Pete Rose, a man bet him a car there one day. Said, "I'll bet you." In Aberdeen. Bet him a car that we'd beat him. You know, that's going a long ways.
HB: Tell about the one, had a filling station and came
to Bel Air and
[end of side two, tape one]
and Genera]. Earl or
Early and the fell off or fell off, and
how
they had a dedication of the Woods Building at
and they were all invited and a relative was
there.
FB: She means from playing ball.
HB. You know who they are; that's very interesting.
F But -- What went on first, do you know?
HB: The fellow that -- you know who he was --
FB: Oh. From Rising Sun. We were going to play Rising Sun, and
we beat them. That was about '48, and he was a ringer, sure. '48, '49, something like that. I hadn't seen this guy, only this one time at the ballgane, and we beat him. I bunted the ball and Staples scored from third base and we beat him. So here I see him in Bel Air when I was Commissioner, '66 or 167. After the meeting I said to him, "Shouldn't I know you? I believe I know you." "tanned right," he said. "I owe you a punch in the mouth." I said, "You were the pitcher for Rising
Tin 1dwTh 33
Sun." He said, "Yes, I was supposed to get three hundred and fifty dollars and only got a hundred." (i think it was only a hundred.) So he was going to get three hundred and fifty. Come to find out, he was from Philadelphia and he was arguing over at a filling station in Edgewood then, but of course that was years later. But all those kind of guys.
HB: When you played for the Proving Ground.
FB: I played for the Proving Ground in 1922 under the name of Sargeant Schneider, and we won the Second Amy championship, with me pitching for the Proving Ground. So we were down to the Edgewood Arsenal, about '68 I guess it was, they were dedicating the Woods Building down there. Before we had dinner, they were moseying around the officers' club, just standing around talking. I heard a voice over my shoulder, and J turned around -- and I'd told John O'Neill and Howard Coburn about playing toll at the Proving Ground -- I heard a voice over my shoulder and I turned around and looked at that man, and I said, "Didn't you play ball for the Proving Ground in 1922?" He said, "Yes, but who the hell are you?" I said, "I pitched for you.,, He said, "The Kid?" (i think I was seventeen.) I said, "Yes, the Kid. You played third base or second bnse." He said, "Yes." And I don't remember names very often, but I knew his name after he told me who he was. He was two-star General
He's retired and he lives at Fort Virginia.
And I took him right over to John O'Neill and I told John and Howard Coburn, "You don't believe me when I tell you this. I played ball for the Proving Ground." I said, "Ask the general." He said, "Yes, I was only a lieutenant, but he pitched
Pal thtin 34
for us." And he invited Hazel and I down to spend a week
with him, talk about old times.
HB: Yes, but ten about what happened. Didn't he play ball, go
to Washington, somebody hurt his ear? Was he the one?
YB: No, no. He wasn't the one with the ear. I know what you're
talking about, but I can't recall that. But anyhow, his sister
was General Woods' widow, and they were dedicating that building
to General Woods down there. After all those years, from '22
to '68.
HE: And he wanted us to go to the head table and eat with them.
FB: Oh boy, yes. He said, "Don't eat with them; come on and eat
with us." So I ate with the family. I ate with him. There
were funny things like this.
HE: a man, a soldier that stepped on his ear?
Was that Early? tore his ear off?
FE: That was old Uncle that bit the ear.
HB: You played at the Proving Ground, and a soldier didn't like an
officer and these three spiked and tore the man's
ear off.
FE: Oh, yes. That. I don't know that. I don't remember that
fellow. He went into the base and deliberately kicked him, knocked his ear. Yes, I remember.
HB: Don't tell it if you can't tell it right.
FE: Well, I know about the ear, but I don't remember the name. It was so long ago.
HB; It was Early. Not Uncle Earl; Early. Fellow named Sargeant or Lieutenant Early.
Pa ldwin 3.5
FB: Oh, that was playing soccer. He was playing goal. Lieutenant Early was playing soccer when we won the championship in Baltimore, and they kicked him in the ear. That was Lieutenant Early; he turned out to be a general or something too.
HB: He's still alive.
PB: Yes. Never hear of him. Let me get you a picture of that soccer team. I'll show it to you.
HB: But you did. You went to see Wrly in Baltimore, General
Early. They were called the See Frciddy, he
didn't rehearse this, and what you're asking, it's not all coming to mind right away. I'm on the sideline, and I can remember better than him because I'm just a listener, and it comes to me quicker than it does to him.
W: I guess you really surprised them all, how well you could play. F?: Oh, my. We played the Wingfoots. The Wingfoots were professional.
Germans. And we played the Wingfoots, and they beat us, I think, five-to-two or five-to-three, but they had two referees: their cousins. We played Patterson Park before fifteen thousand
people.
RB: Everybody doesn't know where Patterson Park is • You have to
tell them.
F?: And when Rosenbloom started this club in Baltimore about five
or six or seven years ago, I took him down this picture -- one picture like that -- and I showed him, I said, "If you don't have hometown people, you're not going to have anybody." So what's he do? He goes down in Jamaica and hired all those Jamaicans. They played five games in Pal timore, and he didn't have five thousand people to all five gaines, and he folded up.
Baldwin 36
He'd bought uniforms and everything. We had fifteen thousand
people watching us that day we played for the championship.
HE: Yes, and you were chosen to go play with them. Follow it up. You were supposed to go on to South America.
FE: Oh, yes, yes.
HE: Well, say it. They don't know that's being said.
FE: Yes, I was supposed to go with them. There was an all-Maryland prep football team when I went to Calvert Hall. That's me on this end, and that's Dick. That's Jim Home and all and all those big-time guys from
3M: Now, did you stay down at Calvert Hall?
FB: No. They didn't have a place to go there then. Let's see: I want to get my glasses to see it. See if this one man's on there. I went down to the seven o'clock train in Aberdeen every morning and I walked through the station. See that the
down there, walking. We didn't have anything. You walked all the time.
HE: All right. There's your footbR 11 from your All-Maryland Prep.
Tell how you were chosen All-Maryland Prep.
FE: Well, I showed him this picture.
HE: That's showing it, but that's not telling it. You showed it,
but how were you chosen AU-Maryland Prep to get this football
for being All-Maryland Prep player?
HE: That's right.
HE: Weren't you chosen between you and Jack Woburn?
FE: Yes.
HE; Well, tell it!
Pal dwin 37
FB: I'm looking for this to see if this is Jack Woburn here. don't want to say something that's not right. Yes, that's right. There's Jack Woburn, right there. He went to City College, and we're still friends. We go to Boston to see him and he comes in
HE; And you were going to Maryland Prep that year.
FE: I was the top one; they picked me as the top one.
HE: The Sun did.
FB: The Sun paper did,
HE: And that's the gold ball they gave you. 1924. And I wear it of
my lapel.
JM: And The Sun picked you as the outstanding player that year. HE: It was between he or Jack Woburn. And Jack Woburn was Dr.
Woburn's brother from and he's up in Boston now,
and we're still friends. We've
[chuckles] Now Freddy, show in that book, you have to tell what you're showing. Because he sees it, but the tape has to know what you're showing.
FE: [pauses] Oh, here's another one about the Aberdeen High School. I was the one that got the lights put in at Aberdeen High School, and here's a letter that the principal wrote to me. "We appreciate your help in the completion of our foottel 1 light project. You and your crew rendered a service that we could never have afforded otherwise. I know that with your interest in athletics and devotion to the community of Aberdeen, you must share our pride in fulfillment of this project. Friday night at 7:45 p.m. we're going to dedicate our football lights. I would like very much for you to be there. We want the
Baldwin 38
opportunity to recognize those of you who helped so much," HB: What year was that? Look at the top of the letter. What year was that?
FE: Oh, 161. We went over to Bainbridge and got the poles and things from where Bainbridge had it, with the footb1 1, And most of the electric lines and everything, the lights, and that's how we got them over here, and we put them up.
HE: They gave you the bleachers, also.
FBI Yes, we got the bleachers, too. That was from the high school, the first of it. Here's one from Tony Brackett. He's an attorney in Baltimore. He works for the union, but the government hired him to go all over the country for them.
HE: Yes, but you befriended Tommy before --
FE: And I played ball for Homestead in the thirties, I guess it was. Anyhow, this fellow played W1 He was catching for Homestead in -- I think it was '37. That's when it was, '37. In about '42, I was down at my nephew's party in Baltimore, and an arm came around my shoulders and he said, "Freddy, get me a job." I said, "Do you want to go on a bulldozer?" "I don't care," he said, "I want to get married." There was a man on the Proving Ground -- like I said, I had charge down there for seven and a half years -- and when this man from Chicago first came down there --
HE: You were in charge of what for seven and a hF.lf years?
YB: Practically everything: all the plumbing, heating, sewer, water, everything like that. The only thing I didn't have was the carpenter's shop, electric shop, refrigeration shop and the paint shop. The rest was all under me. Anyhow, I said, "Go
I
Baldwin 39
to this fellow in Chicago" -- and I have to get him to tell
me this Juan's name, because I've forgotten it --
HE: Mathers,
FE: Whatever it was. "And tell him that I sent you, and he'll give
you a job, I'm sure." When I first knew this man, he and I didn't get along because he wasn't doing the work right, and I would just break the pipes out of the ditch and make him put them in. But the last two years, I said, "I don't want any money out of you or anything else. Just do the work right. So I hadn't heard from Tommy in a couple of years. I was down at my nephew's house in Baltimore a couple of years later, and an arm came around my neck. He said, "I can run a bulldozer." This guy gave him the job. So he came back here, and he was a 1-in11player, so the head of this union down there was a tllplayer too, so they hired him as their lawyer. But then the government hired him, to start him off with fifty thousand a year. Now they tell me he's making about two hundred thousand a year, going all over the world for them. Just read that. [pauses]
HE: You have many, many friends, Freddy.
PT: Isn't that something? Here's our first party, of the Oldtiiners baseb11.
HE: Of Harford- County, or what?
YB: Yes, it was held in Harford- County, and it was held in
Rising Sun. This old boy was with the Orioles in 1914, a
catcher. Potts, and you couldn't have gotten a
better catcher in your life. He had a brother, but he was no Ml 1 player. And he just quit the Orioles and came home and went to work. But we had that fire hall, and here's Claude Brown
Baldwin 40
and here's Laura, here, Hazel. I didn't know I had this picture.
HB: Well, I'm going to make you a scrapbook, but I haven't
gotten to it yet. You have many things I have all collected, but I don't have put in.
FB: We had two hundred and fifty people, and Pottsy made two hundred and fifty-one, because they were only supposed to feed two hundred and fifty people.
HB: He had many more clippings. Then a colored woman working for
us, I sent her to the attic one day to clean the attic, and
it was in a and she brought it down and threw them
away. That's all we have left of that, of that paper.
FB: Here's one. You want me to talk that one to you?
JM: Yes. What's this about? -
FB: [pauses]
HB: I didn't know you had those in there.
FB: I didn't know it either, for a while, but I found then. Here's
a little -- this is the same thing, I think -- or is it?
3)1: That's a little bit different.
HB: You just stay downstairs, Freddy, and I'll put your other book in first, in the new book. [pauses]
3)1: It says that you helped make a city dump. Is that here in Aberdeen?
FB: It was here in Aberdeen, and it was sent all over the world as the best dump in the world. I think I had a clipping of that in there; let's see if I can find it. I'll show you the real --[pauses]
3M: It says that Aberdeen had more playgrounds than any -- than
Baldwin 41
South Baltimore.
HE: Well, freddy made them. Different parts of the town, there was land, and he cleared them off and fixed them up and had little children out there, and they were playing. That was before your Parks and Rec
And the kids all were
And there was real competition then. You had to be better; it was a little frightening. Children were children, and they took care of themselves, and they ran
Mothers didn't get into it, and no one else
It makes children; they can think for themselves, and
they weren't thinking like a lot of people today, out to hit you in the head with a b.11 or something like that. That was
FE: That's Nellie. We played an Oldtisners up in Bel Air one day, HB: It was a couple of years ago up in Eel Air, He was the
JN: Yes, he had the orchard, didn't he?
HE: There are McNutts, but he didn't have the orchard. His wife
was a schoolteacher in She's still alive.
Nice family, What are you laying down? What are they?
FE: That's some more pictures of the bailgame in Eel Air. The
time we played up there in Eel Air, that Saturday afternoon
or Sunday afternoon.
HB: But when was this Saturday afternoon?
FB: Yeats ago,
HE: Back in '28?
FE: No, no, this was when Nellie and all of them got together.
Baldwin 42
HE: Well, I've never seen those. You've kept those to yourself.
FB: Well, I thought you had.
HB: No, not to my knowledge.
FE:
J1: Now is this the Oldtimers baseball?
FE: Yes, this is old Cleaver Potts, the one we honored:
that's Cleaver Potts.
HE: About what year? You don't have it marked on. I'll put them
all on if you'll tell me.
J}I: It looks like '73. There's a sash that says 1973.
FE: That's about right.
HE: '73? And it's you?
FB: Yes, this was the Oldtimers, up there in Bel Air one Sunday.
HE: Oh, the group got together and played ball. That was Miss
Baltimore, who's here now, I think, standing there. Yes, this was when the older group got -- You played on the senior high school playground a couple of times, the Oldtimers from the Athletic Association of Baltimore, the Oldtimers. See, Baltimore has these; he's a member there, too.
FE: And we whipped them. They never came back. [chuckles] They didn't like us.
HE: And he was put in the Hall of Fame. Am I correct
on that?
FB: I pitched two, three innings of that game.
RB: You went in with Herb Armstrong, who was the superintendent of schools, public schools, in ltimore.
FB: Had the Oriole uniform on. I went in there to get to the that morning.
Baldwin 43
HE: You don't have the 7
FE: Yes, I've got it.
HB: Well, see now, you've been in all these things and what with
all the others I have for you, I don't have then to put together
when I do it. You haven't shared these,
FB: I've shared
HB: Can't you trust me? Call laugh] Well, you said you shared it
with no one.
FE: I bet you've never seen a dump as clean as that.
JN: I sure haven't. Now where is this?
FE: It's not here anymore. It was right across here where they're
making that new sewer plant, back of Hamilton Court.
HE: At the project. You turn right and it's in there,
to the right.
FE: There's how it was when I first got it. That's when I first
went to town, to seek town.
HE: '52.
FE: That's all the smoke you'd ever see out of that place.
HE: They used to come up and fish, down back in that stream.
FE: Old people would come up on Sundays, down behind this woods. Down behind that woods is a stream. You can see the bank of the other side of the stream now. There'd be anywhere from fifteen to thirty people there, fishing every Sunday; bring their children out there. They had their tables and their chairs, and sit out along here below this place. They just had a ball. The Caterpillar come, he took a picture of it and sent it all over the world: the cleanest dump in the world.
HE: Who was the Caterpillar man? Was that their name? Was it
Baldwin 'A
FB: See, we bought the tractors from him.
3M: Well, you really have a reputation from these articles. As
I can remember, didn't they title you "Freddy the "
FE: That's right. There's Freddy on a bulldozer one day. See, I'd go around there and play around with that bulldozer, cleaning it up so we could get the road down around the creek. I had a man that worked it, and he was just as anxious to have a nice place as I was. It was lucky to have something like that. But Jack Woburn, the one on this picture of the All-State, we're still friends. We go to Boston to see him, and he comes
Did you read this one? I don't know; this is the same thing,
I guess. Was this telling about my boss? -
3M: Yes, right.
HE: And here's the best
JM: Yes, this is the same as the other one.
FE: I guess you read that.
3M: No. [pauses] "Outstanding all-around athlete in the history
of Harford County."
FE: A mighty nice one.
3M: Baseball, track, soccer, boxing, tennis, golf, football.
FE: You know who I used to play against in tennis? I never thought
I could play tennis, but I must have been pretty good. I played
against Herbert Arthur and Risley Baker, the one who just died
here last year? The Oldtirners star and the winner. There's
Baldwin 45
bell atop the county courthouse, or helping a high school football team get lights for their field." I laugh where it says, "Now the voters have recommended retirement. Perhaps it's just as well. Freddy has always been the kind of person you like to have in government, but somehow a bit more of a human being than you come to expect in the political world." [chuckles] I think that's a real compliment.
FB: That's right. Do you want to read, this, or want me to read it to you?
HB: Maybe he can handle it.
3M: Oh. Now this is by Park Chatfield about Sport Chattering.
Isn't that something. Let's see: this was in '63. This is the
Th: No, that's Aberdeen's paper.
Th: [pauses] Let's see. Now, the poem that you have, "Ode to the Canners." "The following is a reprint from the Democrat sport page of Septembr 21, 1955." Do you remember that poem that they wrote in here? "Ode to the Canners?" "Whatever became of their friends and their pals/ of short years ago those fine fellows and gals?/ Those fans that rooted and hollered for every great play/ Those bleachers that were crowded, happy and gay?/ Oh, where are they now, those fans that once cared?/ For the Aberdeen bleachers lay deserted and bare./ Then the season was over, the cup race it was run/
When the League pennant conceded and won./ when
unloved and unwanted ere gallants went down,/ In the post-season playoffs at Old Chesapeake Down./ Now is there an Aberdeen fan whose heart it can soar,/ o'er the flight of the Canners, who
Baldwin 46
were game to the core?/ Or are so calloused that our voices are still,/ Caring not for the Canners nor the traditions we kill?/ For there were Jacobs and Baldwin and three Ripkins,
too;/ and Walker, all in there
fighting for you./ While Grafton and were the
stout-armed pair/ who curled out their arms, but you didn't care./ So what ever became of their friends and their pals/ Of short years ago, these fine fellows and gals?" Do you remember that?
FB: No, I don't just remember, but I just happened to pick this up. I didn't know I had that, even.
HB: There's a lot here, Freddy, that you didn't know. I'm gathering it up, but I can't find it if he -- [chuckles] ill: Isn't that something. That's really nice.
HB: See that cabinet over there? That was in my attic and J brought it down especially to sort: his pile, my pile.
FB: Here's a medal from Georgetown University: third place in broad jump.
HB: That was yours.
FB: Hollard High School never knew it, but the fellows from Hollard. High School would come down and pick me up and take me to these track meets under the name of Charlie Archer. I was in the broad jumping pit at Georgetown. I jumped twenty-one feet, nine and a half inches or something on the first jump. They come and say, "You got get into the hundred-yard dash." I said, "This is a hell of a thing, to put me in a hundred-yard dash out of a broad jumping pit." So I go and get in the hundred-yard dash, and the guy beat me by a foot and a half in the hundred-yard dash. Where do you think he went? He went to the Olympics.
Baldwin 47
In 1924. And the people in Harland never knew it, and the
women up in Harland used, to kid me and carry on about
bailgames and Harland High School. I said, "I'm a Harland
High School alumni."
[end of side one, tape two]
Anyhow, they had us up when I was a Commissioner. This was in
'66, wasn't it, Hazel?
RB: They had an alumni supper.
FB: Anyhow, I went up there and they introduced me as a county
commissioner. And I had this in my pocket. I said, "I don't
want to be introduced as a county commissioner. I want to be
an alumni of Harland High School, and here's the medal to prove
it." And these women were -- But Fred Linkus, that great
football player from Maryland -- he was from Maryland,-he was
one of the boys with us. They'd pick me up and we'd go out
to these different track meets. But that's where it came from.
I held the broad jumping [record] for Harford County until
1958, I guess, from 1923 or '24. In those days, we were out
there at that racetrack, as I said, and they had a great big
piece of wood, a two-by-four, where you had to jump from. Well,
I wasn't going to touch that thing to jump from. I used to
jump from that far in back of it, and I still had the record
for all these years, until some guy here about six years ago
or ten years ago beat me • And here's another thing.
J1' "Presented to Fred Baldwin, 1947. Highest batting average, .439,
Susquehanna League." Isn't that something.
FBi So they wanted to give me a medal to put on my arm or something.
Baldwin 48
I said, "I don't want any medals. I fool with these kids; give me a stopwatch." So I got the stopwatch here. Now this was in 1947. I was forty-two years old. And the one that I was with Eel Air, in 1926, was -- What's that? Oh, yes. That's Aberdeen. I forgot about that.
HB: You're showing but you're not talking. That is a wristwatch
given to you by Say it.
IN: "Baseball championship, 1946.'
FE: This is a watch that the town of Aberdeen gave me for running the ba].lclub in 1946. We won the pennant.
HE: That was presented to you by the team.
FE: We had a big banquet and everything. I didn't know I was going to get it, but they presented it to me. This was in -- I was forty-two years old when I got this. But when I was in, Eel Air in '26, when the Orioles signed me, John O'Neill's father was a schoolteacher. He told me I was hitting .556. That's when the Orioles signed me. .556. You very seldom get up to that kind of -- I didn't know it, but John O'Neill's father kept score. And I can't find the book. I'm looking for any old.timers' scorebooks I can find so we can have them someday to put them on display in the Oldtimers' Association. I never knew it was in the paper, but one day somebody said, "You get Chatfield's paper." And that shows what we've done. It's not only me in the paper. But Chatfield, when he first came up to me, he didn't even want to talk to me. [laughs] He was kind of scared of me. He was the new man around town, and they told him, "You'd better watch him," they said. [laughs] Our life
Baldwin 49
has been with the kids around here. I'm on my knees every night to thank the Lord for what I have. But I always ask Him to help everybody; I just don't thank Him for my own. I ask Him to help everybody, because everybody needs help. A man came up to me, he was down at the Proving Ground to the
Were you down there the day on the veterans?
RB: The Vietnam veterans.
FB: The Vietnam veterans, and somebody else. I had a man come up
to me and introduce me to his son. He said, "Freddy, will you
get him a job?" I said, "Where's he living?" He says, "He
just came up from someplace, he's living with me. He's got
three children, four children." He said, "You gave me a job
thirty years ago." Which I did, on the town. I talked to a
fellow, and I believe the fellow was calling him already.
HB: Well, when you came home, the fellow was here, the boy.
FB: Yes, the man working for us -- I thought he needed a man, so
I told him to get in touch with hint, and I know this guy will
do him a good job. The man said, "He can run a bulldozer, he
can carpenter, he can paint, he can do anything." So I don't
know what happened to him, wherever he's living. He's up here
in Aberdeen now, with his father. But people come in here and
ask me to get them jobs, and I try to get them jobs. I have
a lot in the county that used to work for me in Aberdeen, a
lot of the workers on the ronris. They worked for me in Aberdeen,
and they're still working for the county. Some of them retired,
I guess, now. I know this colored boy. But it never does no
harm to help people. I never hold a grudge on nobody, no
matter how bad they treat me. I hold no grudge. I had a guy
Baldwin 50
that held a grudge on me for thirty-three years from striking him out in a baflgarne. What do you think of that? [chuckles] Thirty-three years. And after thirty-three years, he came to me in a diner one day and apologized for it. Well, I don't know tat else I could tell you. I know there's a lot of things, but I think I've taken up enough of your time.
314: Well, all in all, you've seen quite a lot of changes that have come in to the town.
FB: Certainly.
314: Is there anything that you wish, maybe, that's sort of fogotten now, that you wish that Aberdeen hadn't lost, or Harford County? Of anything?
HB: There's one thing: the charter.
FB: Oh. That's Harford County, the charter. That was the wrong thing to do, put a charter in this town. Yes, sir. I was against it. That charter. That wrecked the whole works, and ain't nothing doing on it now. They won't give up on it.
HB: All those that were back of it, thought it was the best thing. They've found out now.
FE: The very ones that came to me and wanted me to go with them on it, said, "You were right, you were right."
HE: Well, Billy James and all the group said they were wrong.
John Clarke and all of them. All of them
said it was wrong.
FE: Yes, it's too bad. But when just three of us was up there with that charter, we could sit down and work things out. That handicapped school there in Eel Air, in the old Methodist Church. One guy wanted to sell it for a hundred and fifty
Baldwin 51
thousand, but we didn't give him no hundred and fifty
thousand. All those kind of things.
JM: What was it like being a county commissioner? Was it a very demanding kind of thing? Did people --
FE: No. I got along fine that way. These people would call me up, and I'd go out and talk to them. If they were wrong, they were wrong. If I was wrong, I was wrong.
HE: But it's far different from county councilman. Like day and night. There's so many holes in County Council
FE: That's right. We're now called for all of this. I'm sure
what's going to happen is, going to try to
run the county. They're talking about getting the County
Council moved, aren't they, to ? Where are
they from? They're all out of Baltimore. They're not worrying over this county. It's too bad.
JiB:
Now there's so much formality, you can't do anything.
FB: [chuckles] And they've got so many in the audience now, carrying on and, getting up and talking. They don't know what they're talking about, half of them don't.
HE: Didn't you use to do that, after the meeting was over? You had an open forum.
FE: You went through with what you had, to do, with the county commissioners. Now, it's all scattered helter-skelter and everything else.
Baldwin 52
.1)1: Was the government, too, a lot more simplified, as the commissioner system? It wasn't as many --
FB: Sure. You didn't have so many running around and hollering
about this, hollering about that, wanting their part done and letting the other ones go. I got the second story put on the
nursing home in and I got the third story,
I think, in the hospital. I was in there then. With Hal
Colt and John O'Neill. You go into Hospital,
they've got a gold plaque up on the wall. I'm sure my name is right on it. Now, they've gone to millions of dollars, building on the same land, but they're putting it higher. And the beds will be filled, too. They'll be all filled.
HB: You're still on the nursing board.
FB: Yes, I'm on the nursing board.. I was the one who got that place
back of the nursing home for the helicopter. That's a quick job to come in there and sit down and get at it.
.Jlh Were there behind-the-scenes kinds of things when you were a commissioner?
FB: No, we were wide open. We didn't care what people knew. We wanted the people to know it.
HB: You never went into any and met before you
went in. You just went in and took it as it came.
FB: We'd go in there in that place where there's a meeting now, we'd sit down, and from there we'd start. We didn't have any shenanigans going behind the doors. No. I don't know. I hate to see what they're doing up there. Seems like it's getting worse. Now they want to put the bell back on top of the courthouse, want to get it fixed. And the thing's no good
Baldwin 53
up there. The people in Bel Air had shot the pigeons, and it was metal around those posts. When they put a hole through it and water got in there, it deteriorated all those posts in under there. They were going to spend twenty thousand dollars or more to fix it, and I took it down for eight hundred and twelve dollars and fifteen cents, because I had taught this man how to play soccer years ago. But it's a shame. I don't know what they're going to do with all that building, but they're building. That thing's going to be two stories in the ground.
JN: Did you enjoy working with Mr. Coburn and Mr. O'Neill?
FE: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
HB: You went every Tuesday when they met. But you met more than
FE: Oh, yes, but we got along fine.
NB: And you said John Worthington
and you didn't have to go into a back room and
FE: That's right. We had lunch at the Hickory Inn. [chuckles]
Everybody was there to see what we were doing.
.Th: Have the newspapers always been real involved in what the county's
doing?
HE: Not as Didn't have so much to talk about.
TM: Because it seems like now, if I were to -- I just see lots
and lots of interest groups, you know, from all kinds of different
areas, working through the Council, and I just wondered whether
you had that kind of thing.
PB: We all paid our check. When we went out to lunch or dinner
or anything, we paid our own check. We didn't have one guy
Baldwin .54
sign it for the whole group. When they're signing fora whole group, the county's paying for it. We paid it out of our own pockets. We didn't ask nobody to pay our lunch time or noontime or whatever it was. It's a shame what's going on. I don't know anything else.
HB: Maybe he might have another question that might help you to think.
3M: What about Aberdeen? How different is it now?
FB: Altogether different. Altogether different now. Nothing like it used to be.
HB: In looks or anything. Stores, nothing. People.
FB: When I was in charge of Aberdeen, the streets were swept every morning, and I bought a truck like a garbage truck and I put a thing on the side to suck the dirt out of the gutter. -The housing corporation up here, I told those people to all rake the leaves in the streets. Tell those people to rake the leaves in the street and we'd get them. One afternoon, we'd clean them all up, because this thing would just suck it right up. Besides being a garbage truck when we needed it, it was a street cleaner. Every morning it was out on the streets and just cleaned this garbage back. When you needed long pipe to haul, you just stuck it in that garbage truck. Then you'd bring it out and just roll it right back out of the thing. But that garbage truck would pack those leaves so tight, that eight and ten foot of leaves would come out like a gumwad and not falling off. Now, they got three trucks running around there, and they sold it for five hundred dollars.
HB: That was eight thousand dollars.
Baldwin .5.5
FB: Yes, they sold it for five hundred dollars, just to get it out of the yard. And the machine. The machine was worth twenty-seven hundred, the leaf-sucker. I told them when a man wanted to sell me that leaf-sucker, I said, "I'm not going to pay you no big price, but I'll try to sell this thing for you." And people would call me up from Rising Sun, Oxford, Pennsylvania, "What about that truck?" I said, "Fine, that machine. See, you sit on the fender." Now what they do is they pile the stuff up in a duinptruck, run down to the dump and dump it.
HB: And lose half of it.
FB: On the dumptruck. [chuckles] It's really a shame. I had twenty-four men. I had twenty colored men and four white men, and when Hazel was in Florida (she used to have to go to Florida in the wintertime), most of the time I had a pot of soup up there for them every lunchtime. Everybody would get a bowl or a cup of soup. To get the minds going good, we'd start playing checkers. No, this was after work. So after work we'd sit there. I didn't have no place to go and some of the men didn't have no place to go. We'd sit there until five-thirty, six o'clock, playing checkers. Keep their minds going. So what did they do? The commissioners came up there one day and saw these checkerboards. They said, "You guys get rid of those checkerboards. Too much fooling around here." I said, "No fooling til after work here." And they were snapping into it, just like they're smart. I can't tell you what I'm going to say on this. Turn this thing off.
[interview interrupted]
J1: Weren't both of you actively involved in getting the flags
fln 1 dwin 56
put up? Isn't that a project that you all --
HB: What flags? For the Bicentennial?
.711: The flags that they put on for the Route 40 and then up on
RB: You're speaking of the Bicentennial flags.
J1(: Yes.
HB: I was county chairman. State county chairman, for the
Bicentennial. General , he took Aberdeen. We
had three municipal towns. Aberdeen, and
Bel Air. Jack had Aberdeen. He is the one that
worked on that. I don't want to take the credit for that. They were all under me, but he's the one that interceded and had that done.
FB: You're going to have to cone back and put her on tape.
JM: I know. -
FB: I won't be on that, because she can do it all herself.
JM: [chuckles] But you can help her think of things.
FB: I thank you for coming down here. You want to quit it now?
I thank you for coming down here, because this is the first
time anybody's ever come down and interviewed and got a story like this from me.
[interview interrupted]
Senator James' father was a professional ballplayer down south. Roy James. A group of them left Aberdeen to help build the Panama Canal. When the Panama Canal was finished, they started playing bnll up through the country to get home. To make money to get home. There were about four or five from Aberdeen; I can't name them all. But I know Billy James' father was one of
S
Baldwin 57
them, and he started me to play ball in 1920 in Aberdeen when I was fifteen years old. They were kicking on the Kid, and he said, "That Kid's got more guts than all of you big ones.' It used to just be a combination who was going to play on these ball clubs. Billy James' father was a really good ballplayer, and he's the one that started me in 1920 to play bi1l, in the Susquehanna League, when I was fifteen years old.
HB: You honored Billy's father Roy James at your Oldtiners meeting, a year ago,
PB: Yes, at the Oldtlners' Baseball meeting. That's what we're trying to do for people that help out and do things like this,
to honor them. Davis. He was a good ballplayer
around there. He came down there last year, and he brought four or five fellows from the Phillies, in the Phillies front office. And he brought four or five fellows from this big-
league club, was from Rising Sun. He played
with us. He went to Wake Forest. He was a fine guy. But he's sitting right in that Phillies front office.
HB: And Joe Gilbert used to play with you.
FE: Oh, yes. That piece of paper had Joe Gilbert,
They were all good
ballplayers. But it's just not like it used to be. Everything's turned topsy
HB: It's a wonderful thing when we go out and these young boys that were young boys when our son was about the same age, all going
around together, they still come up and say, "Hazie, how are
Baldwin 58
you?
[all, laugh]
We still receive cards from all over the United States from
a lot of those boys with our
children chaperones from
dances.
And I'd do it all over again.
FB: From '37 to the end of '45, she ran the works. Had all the kids in town would come down here in the yard and would play on the ground, and she took care of everything. I couldn't. I was
HB: When they had this junior prom, seniors, they had this one wheelbarrow
FB: And we got the flowers and everything.
HB: All the flowers I had, and got the flowers and stuck
FB: No, sir. I never regretted any of it. They used to whistle at me to come out here. She'd say, "Who was whistling?" One night I walked down the road, and there were all these young kids out there, and I got in there and I started whistling. [laughs] She couldn't pick this whistle out. She knew it was strange, but she didn • t know it was me whistling in the group.
HB: It was a game we played. They'd go and you'd close your eyes and they'd go hide different places, and you'd call fictitious names or something you'd call out or whatever, and you had to identify them.
End of Interview